Integral Ad Science partners with Google, InMobi & MoPub to give ad transparency a boost
Integral Ad Science (IAS), the technology and data company, has partnered with mobile advertising giants Google, Twitter-owned MoPub and others to launch a Media Rating Council-accredited open source SDK code for mobile ad viewability.
The new metric seeks to assuage industry concerns over ghost clicks and fraudulent bots by creating a universal industry-wide standard for measurement. To achieve this the code collects raw data to determine accurately whether an ad was viewed or not with other developers at liberty to augment this with their own reporting tools.
"It's our code that we're donating to the cause. We just think that we need transparency on everything," said Scott Knoll, chief executive of IAS, noting that open source is the quickest route to that. Knoll stresses that the code is only for ad viewability measurement and not fraud measurement.
Other partners to be signed up include Conversant, InMobi, OpenX and The Trade Desk although some major players, such as Apple and Facebook, are notably absent. IAS remains hopeful however that they may join at a later date.