What is the Media Rating Council (MRC)?
The Media Rating Council (MRC) is a US non-profit industry body, founded in the 1960s, that sets standards for advertising measurement and audits measurement companies. Its accreditation signals that a vendor's metrics, such as impressions, viewability or invalid traffic filtering, meet published standards. Its guidelines define viewable impressions and the GIVT and SIVT categories.
The MRC was created after US congressional hearings on broadcast ratings accuracy. Today it accredits TV ratings, digital ad servers, ad verification vendors and others after independent audits. MRC accreditation is metric-specific.
Key MRC documents include the viewable impression guidelines behind viewability, the MRC IVT guidelines, and standards for outcomes and cross-media measurement developed with industry groups such as the IAB and ANA.