Is an Open Source initiative the key to solving viewability problems?
Following P&G’s chief brand officer Marc Pritchard’s criticism of the “murky at best, fraudulent at worst” media supply chain, the pressure is mounting on the industry to clean up its act and increase transparency around viewability.
Speaking to The Drum at Mobile World Congress (MWC), Jason Cooper, mobile general at technology and data company, Integral Ad Science (IAS) said its Open Source SDK initiative can help marketers by providing a “unified approach to measuring viewability”.
Cooper said that app developers and publishers can take advantage of IAS’s open sourced software development kit (SDK) to measure their mobile inventory without having to “install thousands of native SDKs” in their apps which increase “risk and overhead” into the app.
“One of the SDKs which was sold for viewability we have open sourced and [have made] it available to everyone who wants to solve this problem,” he explained.
Cooper’s comments follow the increased scrutiny around verifying the accuracy of data given to marketers. Tech giants Google and Facebook have committed to becoming more transparent about their data by having it audited by the Media Ratings Council (MRC) and while Cooper thinks the moves made by Google and Facebook are “fantastic for the industry” in terms of increasing transparency and accountability, brands can start taking action now.
“Brands can start optimising for viewability right now. Start asking to trade on viewable impressions. It’s fundamentally important,” he said.