George Ivie is celebrating his 25th year as Executive Director and CEO of the Media Rating Council – and it’s safe to say his job hasn’t gotten easier over time. Here, Ivie shares what’s new, and what’s ahead for the MRC.
The MRC has expanded its purview as the media business has evolved. What are upcoming initiatives you can share?
Yes, over the years (and accelerating recently) the MRC has expanded its focus into more areas of measurement as well as expanding our membership, the number of products we audit and standards we have written/deployed. Some examples of newer validation work areas for MRC include — CTV, streaming, retail media, point of care, out of home, third-party data suppliers, brand safety processes, identity processes, AI/machine learning applications (cropping up everywhere), attention and outcomes measurement.
Another easy way to discern where some of the future focus areas of MRC will be is to look at standards development projects we have in flight — for example we are presently working on a programmatic auction transparency standard, OOH phase 2 focused on OOH audience measurement as well as we will soon be opening up another phase of the cross-media measurement standard to move beyond video to add more guidance on inclusion of display and audio sources.
How deep have you gotten into retail media?
We are very deep into retail media audits/validation; I recently spoke on this topic on a panel at the measurement day that ran concurrently with the recent NRF convention in NYC. We have accredited certain metrics across several RMNs such as Amazon, Criteo and Instacart, with several other RMNs in process. We also collaborated with IAB to produce specific RMN standards/guidance. There is a lot of activity here with many networks and infrastructure vendors coming to us to discuss and get involved in the accreditation process. These are also global efforts where we are working with some RMNs that do business internationally and are seeking to use MRC’s rigorous accreditation process, once earned, to build trust internationally. In fact we have recently formed a European-centric audit committee within MRC wherein some of the focus of this group will be reviewing and assessing RMN audits centered in Europe — we are also seeking new members who may be interested participating in these global activities.
What is the biggest challenge facing measurement companies right now?
There are a lot of challenging areas — I’ll mention a few: (1) ensuring newer media consumption channels used by consumers are fully and fairly reflected in measurement, (2) continuing to ensure fair representation of the population being measured, across all population groups, (3) ensuring effective measurement can continue as signal loss occurs due to privacy regulations, which are compelling and necessary, but sometimes can create measurement challenges, (4) reflecting more passive measurement techniques and data-sets into research products such as larger data sets, with proper cleaning and adjustment (an area where we have considerable expertise), (5) keeping invalid traffic filtration guidance strong and robust, (6) ensuring variability associated with reported results are known and appropriately reported to research users, (7) validating/auditing cross-media measurement approaches, and (8) bringing more attention and outcomes measurement products into the MRC audit process to ensure the benefits of standardization and validation/auditing are realized on a wider basis.
