Dive Brief:

• Mobile advertisers are joining the growing desktop chorus of only paying for ads that have been viewed, but ad sellers are pushing back because of lack of viewability standards.
• Integral Ad Science’s latest quarterly Media Quality Report found that ad viewability overall is down more than 5%.
• Meanwhile, the Media Rating Council, the industry’s top measurement authority, hasn’t accredited any third-party ad tracking firms for mobile ad viewability.

Dive Insight:

Marketers in general no longer want to just pay for ads, they want to pay for those that are actually seen by humans. The trend is rising in desktop advertising and is seeping into mobile, becoming a concern for buyers and sellers of mobile ads. The problem is there’s no established and endorsed way to track viewability for mobile ads at the moment. 

And the problem isn’t really isolated to mobile ads because there are no real standards for viewability for online ads at all. The Media Rating Council and Interactive Advertising Bureaue have one set of standards, agencies such as GroupM have set their own standards – in GroupM’s case a higher standard than MRG and IAB’s standard – and social platforms like Twitter and Facebook set their own standards.

Given the current state of data and metrics for marketers with the future implications and promise this information trove offers them, ad sellers and ad tech firms should be planning on a future where an ad not viewed will soon be an ad not paid for.