By Aron Schatz
MRAID 3.0 was released about a year ago to be the gateway to enhancing rich media advertising in mobile applications. Since that time, the industry has been adopting and embracing the changes to the standard. The work has not stopped for the MRAID working group, though. Through industry collaboration, we have identified a few key things that should be highlighted in a best practices document.
The last MRAID best practices documentation was released in 2014. Times have changed and the working group is excited to announce a new MRAID best practices document for 2018. This new best practices document clarifies many things that were either ambiguous or not well understood and gives helpful hints on how to use MRAID 3.0 to the fullest. The best practices documentation is released for public comment through July 21, 2018. In addition to the changes in MRAID 3.0, another major change was clarifying how a viewable impression should be counted based on what is available for the container. This should help advertisers and publishers in having a determined way to count a viewable impression.
Along with the new best practices documentation, the MRAID working group has also been working on creating a new compliance ad suite for MRAID 3.0. While the original MRAID 2.0 ads are good for testing, they did not test specific MRAID 3.0 functionality. With the new compliance ads, the test coverage has improved to cover new MRAID 3.0 features. The compliance suite now covers proper initialization, event timing, viewability, and even has a compliance ad for negative cases to show what not to do. The compliance ads for MRAID 3.0 are being released for public comment right now.
During this feedback period, the working group will be refreshing the MRAID 2.0 compliance ads for use with MRAID 3.0. Once these changes are complete, the MRAID 3.0 compliance suite will be ready for use for making sure an MRAID SDK is compliant with the standard.
The public comment period for the best practices document and the compliance ads allows MRAID vendors to try and report any feedback before a general release. The working group encourages anyone that has MRAID implementations to try out the compliance ads and read the best practices.
The MRAID working group is looking for feedback before having a general release to the wider industry. This is your chance to make your voice heard. If you have any feedback, now is the time to submit it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aron Schatz, Senior Director of Product Management, Viral Gains