AppNexus gives up MRC accreditations

The Media Ratings Council (MRC) has revoked AppNexus’s accreditations. The ad technology platform has also withdrawn from the accreditation process as of March.

The accreditations were pulled in March after having been suspended in September 2017 “until compliance with requirements for General Invalid Traffic detection and filtration has been established”.

The company has lost accreditation for all metrics. “Accreditation revoked for all previously accredited metrics (Desktop Display Served and Viewable Ad Impressions and related viewability metrics); accreditation had been suspended in September 2017. AppNexus has withdrawn from the accreditation process,” noted a press release on accreditation actions for the first quarter of 2018 from the MRC on Thursday.

The MRC also announced that Facebook and Instagram were both granted newsfeed Served Ad Impressions accreditation in desktop, mobile and mobile app. Cox Digital COMET (formerly Gamut), WebSpectator and Adloox lost or withdrew from some or all of their accreditations within the first quarter of 2018.

We reached out to the MRC for comment and were told by a spokesperson that “They [AppNexus] withdrew from the process so we can no longer represent them as accredited. We are not able to comment further.”

AppNexus’ Director of Communications, Madeleine Kennedy, provided additional context for the move noting:

Earlier this year, AppNexus informed the MRC that we would not seek re-accreditation for our full platform and product suite and that we would discontinue the considerable fee payment associated with that engagement. Given our integrations with third-party verification services that already have MRC accreditation—DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, Meetrics, and MOAT — the process is unnecessarily duplicative both in both cost and effort. Our primary DSP competitors, including MediaMath, The Trade Desk, Google DBM, and DataXu, appear to have made a similar calculation. We plan to work on a separate track to secure MRC accreditation for the AppNexus Publisher Adserver. We have been notifying relevant customers.

About The Author

Ginny Marvin

Ginny Marvin is Third Door Media's Editor-in-Chief, managing day-to-day editorial operations across all of our publications. Ginny writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, she has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.