IAB Tech Lab, an independent consortium plans to simplify the viewability measurement through its new SDK, dubbed as ‘IAB OM SDK’.

Back in 2015, global mobile in-app advertising revenues amounted to 40.5 billion US dollars. Surprisingly, it is expected to surpass 117 billion US dollars in 2020. That’s a 200% uplift in just 5 years!

Yet app publishers still struggle to project ‘Viewability’ to advertisers. Why?

Each advertiser demand different ‘Viewability measurement providers’ to gauge their campaign’s viewability. For instance, Flipboard, a famous news aggregator has to integrate many SDKs from different providers one by one so that they can deliver metrics from the advertiser’s preferred provider.

Table of Content:

IAB OM SDK:

With a goal of easing in-app viewability measurement, IAB Tech Lab has rolled out a universal SDK called ‘Open Measurement SDK (OM SDK). It skips the integration of SDKs from multiple ‘Viewability Measurement and Verification Providers’. OM SDK can get the metrics from third parties without any need of installing their SDKs. So, just one SDK (OM SDK) has to be integrated by a mobile publisher.

This is how IAB defines OM SDK.

“The Open Measurement Software Development Kit (OM SDK) is designed to facilitate third-party viewability and verification measurement for ads served to mobile app environments without requiring multiple ad verification service providers’ (Measurement Providers) Software Development Kit (SDK).”

How does it work?

The SDK will be having a native library for iOS and Android Operating Systems along with a Javascript API (OMID) to interact with tags from third-party measurement providers.

Signals such as Container Geometry, Playback events (if the ad is a video) will be collected by the native library by communicating with the device’s OS and Media Players. Then, these signals are published via the OMID API.

The OM SDK includes support for native and HTML display banner and interstitial ad types as well as native and HTML5 video players.

Also read: 100% Viewability standard may hit publishers soon!

Supported Ads:

The OM SDK enables viewability measurement for the following ad types:

Display (webview based HTML5 ads- banners and interstitials/ full screen) Native ads (native layer rendered image and text ads) Native Video (native player video ads) HTML5 Video in webviews

(Source: IAB Tech Lab)

Publishers’ thoughts:

Publishers welcome the initiative as it addresses the problem existing with the multiple SDK integrations. As OM SDK is built on shared source code, publishers can now get under the hood and see what’s happening. No need to verify the data and rely on multiple providers.

As we all know, a call for standard (common) viewability metrics across all partners (third parties) is not possible considering the current discrepancies and diversification of technologies in use. Each party uses its own algorithms and measurements to assess the viewability and deliver the metrics to the advertisers.

But the OM SDK reduces the hassles involved without asking the third parties to tweak their algorithms.

What’s next?

Dennis Buchheim, Senior VP, and GM of the IAB Tech Lab say a publisher’s effort to support viewability measurement is now greatly simplified. He believes, OM SDK will eventually lead us to new solutions to fight fraud, or address “evolving industry measurement guidelines”

IAB also published the guides for API Specs, developer integration, and testing on its site.

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