Brands With Their Own Viewability Standards Are Causing Headaches for the Ad-Tech Industry

IBM and others aren't satisfied with the definition of an online view

Four years into creating an industry standard for viewability that was meant to assure advertisers humans are seeing their online ads, brands are still fine-tuning the metrics used to gauge whether someone saw a promo. And in turn, tension between advertisers, publishers and ad-tech companies is increasing from the manual work needed to change processes.

IBM is the latest brand to demand more from its digital advertising partners. In an email to publishers (including Adweek) in December from the brand and its agency GroupM, IBM said it started making transactions off of stricter viewability standards than watchdog group Media Rating Council, or MRC, calls for.

“We

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