MRC's new ROI measurement draft standard doesn't have accreditation takers yet

The Media Rating Council has published a long-awaited draft standard for outcomes and data quality that regulates a wide range of ways marketers can measure whether their media investments pay off. But so far, it's not clear the industry self-regulatory body has many firms that want to be audited under the standard. The exhaustively detailed 52-page standard could allow accreditation of hundreds, even thousands, of measurement firms attesting that they adhere to quality-assurance guidelines. But four of five industry players contacted by Ad Age—including some who were part of the working group that helped develop the standard—either said they have no current plans to seek accreditation or declined to comment. Subscribe to Ad Age Sign up now for the latest industry news and analysis Click here The standard, issued last week by the MRC, is open for public comment now and expected to be final by the fall. It's sweeping in scope, including providers of marketing mix modeling, multi-touch attribution and other brand or sales lift analyses. Companies that could ultimately seek accreditation range from boutique one- or two-person firms to giant companies such as Nielsen and media companies that provide their own return-on-investment measures, such as Meta and Google, both of which were part of the working group. Media branches of most of the agency holding companies, many of which also offer their own outcomes measurement tools that could be covered by the standard, were also on the working group, as were a handful of marketers, including Unilever and General Motors. Still, analytics firms seem reluctant to raise their hands to say they will undergo what could be expensive and time-consuming audits. Nielsen and IRI, both big analytics firms that were part of the working group, declined to comment on whether they would seek accreditation. So did NCSolutions, which recently did a sales-impact analysis showing substantial sales lift for L’Oreal USA’s Maybelline on YouTube connected TV. But one exception is TVSquared, a TV measurement firm focused on sales lift and other outcomes from TV buys, whose president Jo Kinsella said in an interview that her company, now part of Innovid, would likely seek MRC accreditation under the standard. Its parent Innovid last year already gained MRC accreditation for its impressions from its ad server business. "Innovid has the served impression accreditation, and obviously TVSquared has an outcomes business," Kinsella said, so MRC accreditation "is something that we're looking to do." Analytic Partners CEO Nancy Smith, however, said her company, which provides marketing mix analytics, multi-touch attribution and other outcomes measurement offerings covered by the draft standard, has no immediate plans to seek accreditation once it’s possible later this year. “It’s yet to be seen whether or not we want to get accredited, just because it’s such a complex space,” Smith said, though she added: “I have a whole lot of respect for what the MRC is doing.” Marketing analytics is “a complex space,” Smith said, adding that she will need to be confident the standard fully covers that complexity. “It remains to be seen,” she said, “if our customers feel it would be beneficial to have the accreditation. Absolutely we would pursue it if they did, but I wouldn’t even know how an auditor would go about it.” Because much of what Analytic Partners does deals with marketers’ proprietary data, she added, “we have agreements with our customers that they can’t come in and audit us, because we have other customers’ data that we handle.” The MRC looks to protect confidentiality in audits in part by having them done by certified public accountants from firms that also handle financial audits. Ernst & Young is the primary audit firm the MRC uses. Should a substantial swath of the analytics industry actually seek accreditation, it raises questions about whether the MRC and its audit firms have the capacity to handle all the audits. But David Gunzerath, senior VP and associate director of the MRC, said the group also can assign audits to Deloitte and BDO. Costs of the audits, which are charged by audit firms and not funneled through or marked up by the MRC, could still prove prohibitive for the large number of smaller analytics shops potentially covered. But Gunzerath said the MRC tries to take into account the cost burden in developing audits and uses its collective buying power to negotiate discounted rates. Top marketers, brands and agency ventures Ad Age Datacenter’s definitive rankings of the biggest U.S. and global advertisers and agency companies Click here “When we write standards, it’s not like we generally have a line of 12 people waiting to step up and say they’re ready to be audited on day one,” Gunzerath said. “It’s likely most companies would need to make certain process changes to be able to comply with the standards. It does take a little bit of time, with marketplace forces coming into play encouraging companies to be audited.” The complexity of various analytics approaches covered often means companies have limited understanding of how they work and could add value to accreditation, said Ron Pinelli, VP of digital research and standards for the MRC. But just having a standard is no guarantee providers will opt for accreditation. The MRC discovered that with standards for third-party data providers that have been on the books for years, but none of the providers have yet opted for audits. Ultimately, third-party data firms such as Experian or Publicis Groupe’s Epsilon may have to be part of audits, though, because their data is part of the component backbone for getting representative samples from big device data sets used by firms such as Comscore, iSpot.tv or VideoAmp, which are applied or intend to apply for accreditation for their audience measurement. One group that may be among the first to seek accreditation may be media companies themselves, such as Meta, Google and Snap, which were part of the working group, said Ron Pinelli, VP of digital research and standards for the MRC. It’s not third-party measurement, but the standards do cover standardized measurement and analytics practices and data quality that could provide assurances to marketers relying on the numbers. One frequent criticism of MRC accreditations is that the audits can help ensure companies abide by the processes and methodologies they commit to, but don’t ensure the processes lead to accurate results. Pinelli said, however, the new standard incorporates a host of guidelines around data quality and puts guardrails around what’s acceptable in modeling and estimation, all of which can help ensure accuracy. They essentially standardize some rules that, while they may have been followed by many firms, haven’t been recognized industrywide before. “Anything in the realm of marketing mix modeling, attribution as well as efficiency metrics and ROI are in the scope,” Pinelli said. “We even talk about things that are post-purchase in terms of brand lift and sentiment, but we carve out that certain things that delve into the cognition and attention space, that’s not explicitly covered. That’s really the only thing we’ve carved out for later work.”

Why MRC's new ROI measurement draft standard doesn't have many takers for accreditation yet

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