In a letter sent on Tuesday 15th December , the MFA have asked their members to demand independently audited ABA web data from the online publishers they spend money with. Over the past 12-months the MFA was part of an industry-wide initiative to develop the ABA Web Audit and has been actively involved in the setting of rules that govern the audit and reporting process.
Gary Hardwick, MFA President comments “Our industry spends billions a year making media placement decisions and rightly so, our clients are increasingly looking for confidence in the decisions we are making on their business – this is why transparency and accuracy of data and information is mandatory.
The ABA audited web data process, without question provides this confidence and I encourage our industry to be extremely cautious about using numbers that have not agreed to undergo this process to make these commercial decisions. The truth is in the detail and for sites that are not audited, can we believe in the numbers?”
The letter identifies the areas of risk that the audit brings into focus and informs members of the MFA’s involvement in the setting of measurement and reporting practices relating to rich media; non-user requested content such as auto-refresh; the placement of tags and double counting issues. The MFA has identified these as important factors that put their clients’ investment at risk because they may be wasting valuable ad-spend on audience reach that doesn’t exist. Read the Letter
Gordon Towell, ABA CEO applauded the MFA on the initiative, “There has been a groundswell of support from the media industry following the launch in June. It has also become absolutely clear that media buyers and advertisers are now demanding the same level of accountability and comparability of web audience data as exists for print media. There is now no reason for any publisher not to participate given the low-cost to audit and the opportunity to provide credible information to their media buyers and advertisers.”
The ABA Web Audit rules and guidelines cover the application of the Nielsen measurement technology by audited publishers as well as rules relating to the reporting of audited data in accordance with globally agreed standards. ABA audited data will only report user-requested and user-focused data and will exclude automatic content such as autorefresh pages, pop-ups, pop-unders, interstitials and auto-play rich-media.
Kerry Field, MFA Digital Committee Chair and Partner, Innovation, Mindshare considered it the right time to remind MFA members of the benchmark that has been set with the introduction of the audit best-practice. “MFA members have a right to demand all web publishers they deal with are ABA audited. The ABA’s role as independent monitor and auditor of online media gives media buyers greater visibility, confidence that only user-generated activity is reported as well as understanding of traffic fluctuations and other anomalies.”
There are a number of ways that measurement data using the tagging methodology can be manipulated. The release of these rules and guidelines and the audits conducted by the ABA ensures publishers data collection procedure are compliant and reported on a consistent basis – an important achievement for the online medium.”
The MFA is also supporting members with a series of information presentations in conjunction with the ABA during December and January.
