META Meta Platforms Inc

By Mike Shields 

A pair of top advertising trade groups are urging publishers to consider adopting a uniform means of tracking whether ads can be seen in their mobile apps.

Ad buyers are hoping the move may spur the likes of Google and Facebook, which dominate digital advertising, to eventually come on board.

As more ad budgets shift toward targeting people on mobile devices, both the American Association of Advertising Agencies (known as the 4A's) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (known as the IAB) are coming out in support of an open source initiative aimed at standardizing viewability measurement for mobile apps.

Specifically, the vision is for the industry to jointly develop a single code base that mobile publishers can plug into their apps, letting advertisers pull data on viewability in a standard fashion, said Joe Barone, managing partner of digital ad operations for GroupM and chairman of the 4A's Digital Operations & Technology Committee.

Mobile advertising is expected to grow at a rapid clip over the next few years, as Americans become more and more glued to their mobile devices. But marketers continue to scrutinize digital ad budgets, as the industry has grappled with fraudulent ad space and brands spending money on ads that people never see.

Thus, proving that ads are viewable has become table stakes in many digital ad negotiations. Yet in the mobile app world, the proliferation of viewability tracking vendors has forced ad buyers to reconcile inconsistent data sets for many ad campaigns. Meanwhile, publishers, even as they look to protect their user experience, are often forced to integrate software from multiple third paries that can slow down their apps.

The plan is to have various constituencies from the industry develop a standard tracking code over the next several months, with the IAB overseeing the collaboration.

"This will be a very regimented, very democratic process," said Alanna Gombert, general manager of the IAB Tech Lab.

Tracking whether ads are viewable in mobile apps is trickier than on desktops, say ad buyers, since it requires a unique technological solution -- one that often must be applied app by app.

And even as more mobile publishers have worked to integrate various viewability tracking partners, ad buyers remain frustrated that Google and Facebook have been hesitant to allow for the same level of direct data collection. This frustration has only been exacerbated by a string of recent metrics miscalculations by Facebook.

Google, for its part, says it has agreed to participate in the open source initiative, but hasn't yet committed to put any new tracking code directly in its mobile apps.

The fundamental data marketers require to make sure people are seeing their mobile ads remains a point of friction in the ad world.

According to Mr. Barone of the 4A's, a single piece of code will make it much easier for both apps and advertisers to track mobile ad campaigns without having to implement multiple sets of tracking vendors and having to reconcile different data sets. "This is a search for consistency," he said. "We believe viewability data ultimately becomes a commodity."

But as with any industrywide initiative, consensus won't necessarily be easy. Right now, many ad buyers and publishers work with their own preferred vendors for tracking viewability and may be reluctant to change things up.

"I'm cautiously optimistic," said Wayne Gattinella, chief executive of the ad tracking firm DoubleVerify. "The devil is in the details, and there are a lot of details."

Some third-party data companies may ultimately feel as though their proprietary tracking code is part of what makes their services unique -- and that their data is far from a commodity. If everyone in mobile advertising starts using the same tracking code, it's possible some might question the value of multiple third-party measurement firms.

Moat Chief Executive Jonah Goodhart said he plans to contribute some code to the open source initiative, but said that any standardized offering won't have the same breadth of metrics a custom integration would.

A comScore spokesperson said the research company supports the idea of streamlining viewability measurement -- as long as there are assurances that the quality and sophistication of such data collection is maintained.

The viewability tracking company Integral Ad Science (IAS) is very much on board with the concept. In fact, last month IAS announced it's own open source code plan, which had the support of several mobile ad companies.

Without something like this, mobile advertising won't grow as fast as it should, argued IAS Chief Executive Scott Knoll. "We're kind of at a standstill," he said.

Jeff Coon, vice president of global alliances for the mobile ad firm inMobi -- which helps sell ads for 30,000 apps -- said that working with multiple metrics vendors is a major headache, since any tweak to their tracking software often requires individual apps to have to go through the app store approval processes again. Thus, he's fully supportive of an open source initiative.

"These viewability vendors, I've told them, 'You're all writing same code, get over it,'" he said.

Regardless, there's the big open question of whether the industry's mobile app giants -- Facebook and Google, not to mention Snapchat -- will be on board with directly implementing third-party tracking code of any kind.

"It would be really good if they were," said Mitchell Weinstein, senior vice president of ad operations at the media buying firm IPG Mediabrands. "We hope that if there's enough buying pressure they'll seriously consider it."

Write to Mike Shields at mike.shields@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 06, 2017 14:17 ET (19:17 GMT)

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