Industry Isn't Quite Ready for Mobile Measurement, Says MRC

Mobile measurability is still a ways away, according to George Ivie, chief executive (CEO) of the Media Rating Council, as the industry’s standards have yet to catch up with the latest technology.

According to IAB research, nearly half of marketers perceive sales as a mobile campaign key performance indicator (KPI). Around 40 percent consider social media shares and likes, searches, and click-throughs as KPIs, as well. To that end, many marketers have begun operating with a “mobile is the new digital” mindset, according to Ivie.

“The train has already left the station,” he said during a discussion at the IAB Marketplace in New York. “People want to trade on whole campaigns with things like viewability and audience-based currency, and they already assume mobile is going to be part of it.”

However, Ivie says that while mobile is undoubtedly important, industry standards have yet to catch up with technology. Mobile viewability hasn’t been defined in a concrete way. The incompatibility between iOS and Flash, and a battery life-conscious redesign are two issues that still have to be ironed out, Ivie says.

To test out the hypothetical standards, Ivie recommends pilot-testing with real ads to see how consumers interact with them, as well as analyzing the way they interact with their devices. Ivie doesn’t think this will take as long as it did with desktop, the learning process of which served as a crash course in future viewability.

“Just on the surface, when you think about desktop metrics, they haven’t changed all that much,” he said. “Thinking about all the variations of apps and mobile utility, it’s extremely dynamic.”