The Media Ratings (“MRC”) council hopes to issue draft OOH measurement standards in the first quarter of 2022.  That was the key takeaway from MRC CEO George Ivie’s talk at last week’s IBOUSA show.  Here are some excerpts:

We’ve been around for 55 years.  Non-profit located in New York.  7 employees.   Advertisers used to pay for online digital ads whether they were viewable or not.  The MRC set a standard for when to charge for online ads, e.g. when the ad has an opportunity to be seen.

We also set standards for invalid or fraudulent traffic to screen out bots.  We set standards for how to filter traffic to remove bot traffic.

We’re working on a set of standards right now for out of home media.  It’s a long time coming but we have a line of sight to the end…we expect to release a standard for public comment in the first quarter of 2022.

There’s a lot of things in a standard.  What are definitions.  What is an exposure zone.  Not everybody has to use the same metric.  We’ve completed a standard for digital place based advertising.

We conduct audits of companies that measure media.  We verify that they are doing their work properly.  We test data collection and editing.  Organizations receive accreditation from us.

Billboard Insider’s take:  The out of home measurement world will change in 2022.  Once MRC standards are issued the path is open to anyone to become accredited and offer OOH measurement data.  MRC accreditation is expensive and time-consuming but we could be entering in a brave new world where multiple companies (e.g. Geopath, Comscore, Cuende) compete to provide measurement and impressions data.

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