The Media Rating Council has released its Standards on Outcomes and Data Quality, a set of guidelines for neutral gathering, usage and evaluation of data as the media measurement landscape evolves to include more cross-media and hybrid measurement models, in addition to privacy regulation that makes demographic data more fragmented and less ubiquitous.

The lengthy and extensive document presents guidelines for collecting, evaluating and using data. One section covers guidelines for areas that are not a direct measure of sales such as leads, inquiries and requests for information, search, purchase intent, online and offline visitation and interaction. Another section looks at measurement of outcomes with guidelines for direct measure of sales, such as conversion, CRM, sales datasets and downstream metrics such as ROI.

The measurement of ad and media delivery and exposure segment sets guidelines for quality issues including ad viewability, duration, audience qualification, attention, and attribution approaches such as single touch and multi-touch. Marketing/Media Mix Modeling (MMM) is also discussed. Mix models involve statistical approaches to estimate the impact of marketing on sales with an objective to assess the effectiveness of marketing as compared to a baseline of sales without marketing efforts. Mix models also consider other factors that attempt to account for seasonality and other non-media activities and are generally based on a robust historical dataset at a media or market level.

Technical details for measurement include tracking of users, sources and attribution, and identifying users across devices. Other sections of the document cover data source selection, data preparation and quality checking, quality control over data sources, audience estimates for outcomes and enhancing measurement accuracy, privacy, and data retention and reporting parameters.

The Standards contained in the MRC document originated from a project led by the Media Rating Council (MRC) with sponsorship from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s), and Association of Canadian Advertisers (ACA). They were developed with the participation of a large group of media content providers, advertising agencies, advertisers, vendors/consultants, measurement organizations and other interested organizations.