NEW YORK, Feb. 12, 2018 — Integral Ad Science (IAS), the measurement and analytics company that empowers the advertising industry, today announced that IAS has been awarded an IAB Tech Lab Service Excellence Award for their outstanding contributions to the Open Measurement (OM) initiative. The award honors IAB Tech Lab member companies and individuals for their noteworthy contributions to IAB Tech Lab initiatives over the past year.

Mobile ad spend totaled $58.38 billion in 2017, accounting for 70.3 percent of digital and 28.5 percent of all media ad investment [eMarketer]. Despite the staggering growth in mobile ad spend, many cite it as falling short of its potential due to challenges in verifying at scale that the impressions actually had an opportunity to be seen by real people. Measurement solutions provided by verification vendors require app publishers and supply-side providers (SSPs) to integrate SDKs, however supporting separate SDKs for each vendor can bloat app footprints, require greater resource investment to maintain, and potentially lead to poor consumer experiences among others. These supply-side challenges ultimately result in advertisers not being able to verify the quality of the in-app inventory they are investing in at scale.

In December 2016, IAS announced that it would be contributing its own resources and proprietary SDK towards an industry solution that would enable all verification vendors to align on a single SDK solution and framework, thus eliminating the need for publishers and SSPs to integrate multiple SDKs and enabling advertisers to verify their investments at scale with their vendor of choice.

The IAB Tech Lab assumed governance of this initiative in January 2017, transitioning efforts to the Open Measurement Working Group, where IAS now sits on a leadership team of Commit Group members alongside comScore, DoubleVerify, Google, Moat, Pandora, and the IAB Tech Lab. The Open Measurement SDK is currently available through limited release to members of the working group, with a general availability release to be made towards late Q1.

“The advertising industry has faced challenges around fragmentation and infrastructure in viewability in the last few years. We are proud that our open measurement approach and contribution to the industry is being recognized for the efficiency IAS is bringing to publishers and developers,” says Scott Knoll, CEO, IAS. “This award acknowledges the support and our close relationships within the industry and the overall importance of engaging in cross collaboration to ensure all members of the digital ecosystem have a voice in solving problems related to viewability in mobile environments. We look forward to the additional technical solutions that the IAB Tech Lab will make available to the marketplace soon.”

“It’s an exciting time in our industry when competitors come together to solve technology headaches. Because of the partnerships between leading technology organizations, the OM SDK Initiative alleviates challenges the industry has faced,” said Dennis Buchheim, SVP and GM of the IAB Tech Lab. “The collaboration among the industry’s biggest players is crucial to achieving scale, advancing technology and reaching full transparency.”

“Providing mobile measurement scale to advertisers and solving for all of the inherent industry and technical challenges that were preventing it almost seemed like an impossible task two years ago,” says Joseph Ranzenbach, Director of Product, IAS. “It’s incredibly exciting to see an industry align on delivering a solution that can truly work for everyone. We thank the IAB Tech Lab for their tireless support in this initiative.”