Some standards are developed by industry bodies and others are imposed by industry leaders. Google Open Bidding lets third-party ad exchanges participate in real-time ad bidding. It’s been criticized for siphoning revenue to Google and creating duplicate ad bids. The Trade Desk dropped it in February and the Yahoo and Amobee demand side platforms dropped it last week. Pick your own Star Wars analogy.
Mom always said you need standards, right? Be sure to tell her the Media Ratings Council has just released a draft framework for “outcomes” measures such as funnel metrics, attribution, media mix models, and lift testing. The proposal also covers data quality and privacy. At 53 pages, it’s not light reading but it does illustrate just how hard it is to do measurement right.
IAB Tech Lab will extend its Open Measurement SDK to Connected TV (CTV), starting in Q3. The extension lets a single piece of code deliver viewability information to any verification service the advertiser chooses. It also adds CTV-specific measures such as signaling if the TV is off when an ad is delivered, which seems like a useful thing to know.
Like trouble, bad behavior by Meta shows up whether you look for it or not. The latest is an open-source language model that was supposed to provide reliable search results because it was trained on academic papers. Alas, it was quickly withdrawn after reviewers found that it returned results that were grammatical and plausible but also incorrect, not to mention filled with “antisemitism, homophobia, and misogyny.” How can this be a surprise?