In a joint collaboration between the IAB, IAB Tech Lab, the Media Rating Council (MRC), Bidstack and other industry peers, new in-game measurement standards have been established for ads that appear within gameplay.

These new standards represent a watershed moment for Bidstack and the wider in-game advertising space, with advertisers that are looking to invest into gaming given clear benchmarks on how to measure campaign success.

The IAB released its Intrinsic In-Game (IIG) Measurement Guidelines on June 14th 2022, for public comment, with the full guidelines published on August 31st 2022. Before this update, in-game ad campaigns were measured against standards that were developed in 2009. Since that time, the technology underpinning advertising campaigns and video games has evolved enormously and is now at a very different stage of development.

The updated standards address ad viewability, measurement, inactivity, occlusion and fraud within gaming environments, which helps to align them more closely with the standards applied to the rest of digital media. Building consensus and establishing uniform standards for the industry was necessary to create consistency for media buyers across the in-game advertising marketplace.

Of the new standards, James Draper, Founder and CEO at Bidstack, said "We are delighted to see new measurement standards implemented by the IAB, IAB Tech Lab and MRC. We have been working with these bodies and our peers for a number of years now to help establish these guidelines, and to see them being implemented represents an important step forward for our industry.

Ads delivered directly into gameplay can't be measured in the same ways as interstitial ads, banner ads, or even in-stream ads, so to have been able to make an important contribution towards building a specific measurement framework that can be embraced by both the buy and sell side represents huge progress for us.

Standardisation of this still new ad category will see in-game appearing on more media plans across the globe and will help to deliver greater revenues for game publishers on all platforms."

Full details of the new standards can be found here.