The Media Rating Council (MRC) accredited ComScore "for its mobile viewable impressions and related viewability metrics for display and video ads, in mobile web and in-app, in validated Campaign Essentials," said the measurement company in a Wednesday news release. “We’re working hard to help our clients and the industry bridge the gaps that divide devices and platforms," said Dan Hess, comScore executive vice president-products. "Cross-platform ad verification -- including mobile viewability -- helps close one such gap.” The accreditation builds on another by MRC of comScore's Sophisticated Invalid Traffic detection capabilities that "provide media buyers greater assurance that their desktop and mobile ads have the opportunity to be seen by a real person," the company said.

With manufacturers and retailers scrambling to clear inventory before 2017-model TVs hit stores, deals got sweeter for TV shoppers on Valentine’s Day and ahead of Presidents Day, our survey found. Best Buy pitched customers on TVs under $500 in an email promotion Tuesday that linked to 93 models. Top deal was a 55-inch Samsung 4K Ultra HD TV discounted by $300 to $499. Among other notable Best Buy deals: a Westinghouse 32-inch 720p HDTV for $119 ($30 off); Best Buy's house brand, a 19-inch Insignia HDTV, advertised at $69; an LG 24-inch 720p HDTV ($89), a Samsung 58-inch 1080p HDTV ($499) and a 48-inch Vizio 4K TV, $80 off to $399. For Target’s Presidents Day sale, the retailer sliced $150 off the price of a 55-inch 4K TCL Roku smart TV, bringing it to $399. REDcard customers get another 5 percent off. A Vizio 55-inch 4K TV was cart-priced below manufacturer minimum advertised price at Target, hitting $569 from $699. In its early Presidents Day sale, Dell.com advertised the 50-inch Vizio M50-D1 4K TV as a “doorbuster” at $649.

Facebook is unveiling a feature that helps people provide assistance to and communicate with others immediately after a crisis, wrote Naomi Gleit, vice president-social good, in a Wednesday blog post. The "community help" function is an update to the company's "safety check" feature, which was launched in 2014 and lets users tell friends and family they're all right after a crisis, she said. Called Community Help, the feature is being launched in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. for the first couple of weeks for natural and accidental incidents before it's made more widely available and for more types of incidents, she said. In a separate blog post, Facebook said it updated policies, resources and tools to better enforce rules against discriminatory advertising on its site after the company was criticized last year for permitting advertisers to potentially discriminate against users by race. "We make it clear that advertisers may not discriminate against people based on personal attributes such as race, ethnicity, color, national origin, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, family status, disability, medical or genetic condition," it said. The company said it created a new section that provides more information on anti-discrimination policy and educational resources from agencies and civil rights groups that specialize in fighting such discrimination. Facebook is also testing machine learning technology to spot credit opportunity, employment and housing ads -- "the types of advertising stakeholders told us they were concerned about" -- by "disapproving" them and providing the updated policy.

Since May, when the boards of three major advertising associations met to discuss the problem with ad-blocking software that's costing billions of dollars in ad revenue, the industry is getting closer to better addressing the issue, said Dan Jaffe, executive vice president-government relations for the Association of National Advertisers, in a Thursday blog post. Since that meeting among ANA, the American Association of Advertising Agencies and Interactive Advertising Bureau, the ad community created the Coalition for Better Ads initiative to develop and implement new worldwide standards for online ads that meet consumer needs, Jaffe said. "We are making major progress in developing data in the U.S. and worldwide on what aspects of advertising are creating the highest levels of consumer annoyance and ad avoidance," he wrote. "We believe that shortly we will be able to provide criteria and data to help advertisers significantly mitigate these problems and lessen incentives for ad blocking." He cited "troubling" statistics from a Wednesday PageFair study that said 11 percent of internet users globally implemented ad blockers. If this continues, blocking could undermine content and information on the internet, most of which is supported through advertising revenue, said Jaffe. The ad industry has taken some of the blame for the rise of ad blockers by allowing annoying and bad advertising to be delivered and not addressing users' fears that some ads contain malware (see 1609090057).

Facebook is continuing to make updates to its news feed, including new ways to identify authentic content and to provide relevant posts to users in real time. In a Tuesday blog post, research scientists Akos Lada and James Li and engineering manager Shilin Ding wrote that the social media site is adding "universal signals" to determine authentic stories, which users consider to be "genuine and not misleading, sensational or spammy. To do this, we categorized Pages to identify whether or not they were posting spam or trying to game feed by doing things like asking for likes, comments or shares," they wrote. "We then used posts from these Pages to train a model that continuously identifies whether posts from other Pages are likely to be authentic. For example, if Page posts are often being hidden by people reading them, that’s a signal that it might not be authentic." One that's authentic may rank higher in a user's news feed, they wrote. The other update, they added, will rank content higher in a user's news feed through real-time engagement from many people on Facebook about a topic or a lot of engagement on a post from a page. "If your favorite soccer team just won a game, we might show you posts about the game higher up in News Feed because people are talking about it more broadly on Facebook," the three wrote. Facebook has been making improvements as it fends off complaints about bias, censorship and fake news on its site (see 1612150035 and 1701250083). In a separate blog post, Facebook said it's expanding current measurement partnerships to provide cross-channel comparability and third-party verification and increase transparency. On Monday, Interactive Advertising Bureau President Randall Rothenberg said at the industry group's annual event that there is a "linear connection" between fake news and click fraud, fraudulent nonhuman traffic, data breaches, privacy violations and ad-blocking sources. He said fake news costs companies but also is a "moral failure" and "implicates marketers, agencies, publishers, platforms, and technology companies alike." He said all such interests need to help address and stop fake news.

Google took down 1.7 billion advertisements that violated its advertising policies in 2016, double the amount from the previous year, the company said in a Wednesday blog post. Google caught more by expanding its policies, including to cover payday loan ads, and by upgrading detection technology. Last year, the enhanced technology found and disabled 112 million “trick-to-click” promotions that often appear as system warnings to deceive customers, Google said. The web firm said it disabled more than 68 million bad ads for healthcare violations in 2016, up from 12.5 million the year before. Google took down 17 million ads for illegal gambling and about 80 million ads that deceived, misled or shocked users, it said. Google said it took down 23,000 “self-clicking” mobile ads that automatically download an app without the user tapping anything. The company removed about 7 million ads that intentionally tried to trick Google’s detection systems and suspended 1,300 accounts that cloaked their ads as news, it said. Google took action against 47,000 sites for promoting weight-loss scams, 15,000 sites for unwanted software and 6,000 sites and 6,000 accounts for advertising counterfeit goods, it said. The company said it disabled 900,000 ads for containing malware.

Advertisers need to be careful when running ads or promotions that refer to the NFL’s upcoming Super Bowl, said Wilkinson Barker trademark attorney Mitchell Stabbe in a blog post Tuesday. “The NFL’s rule book defines trademark violations very broadly,” said Stabbe. “If anyone were willing to throw the red flag to challenge the league’s position, a review from the booth might reverse some of those calls.” Though the NFL challenges almost any use of the term “Super Bowl,” some of those challenges are vulnerable to argument, Stabbe said. One example is local broadcasters that use the word Super Bowl in the title of a news program about the game, Stabbe said. “There is a strong argument that such naming constitutes permissible ‘nominative fair use,’” Stabbe said. The NFL also looks dimly on advertising that uses the term “Super Bowl,” or paid events or contests that use the trademark, Stabbe said. The league has a “huge incentive” to be so aggressive with trademark protection because its Super Bowl advertisers pay the league a great deal for exclusive sponsorship rights, Stabbe said. Uses of the trademark outside those agreements chip away at that exclusivity, he said. Broadcasters are better off not running the risk of litigation with the league, since they need the NFL to give them media credentials to cover the Super Bowl, Stabbe said.

Amazon is rewarding customers who gobbled up its Fire devices for the holiday season with a 50 percent off sale Friday on select content. Billed as “the deal event for your devices,” Digital Day will offer customers up to 50 percent off "more than a thousand" TV shows, movies, music, apps, mobile games and e-books, said the company. Amazon urged customers to subscribe to its Digital Deals and News newsletter for information on the Friday sale and upcoming deals.

U.S. advertisers spent $17.6 billion on digital ads in Q3, the highest third quarter on record, said the Interactive Advertising Bureau in its latest revenue report for internet advertising, which was prepared by PwC. In a Wednesday news release, IAB said the Q3 spending was a 20 percent jump over the same period in 2015 and a 4.3 percent increase from Q2 this year. “The momentum of advertising in mobile, digital video, and other innovative formats is undeniable,” said IAB Chief Marketing Officer David Doty. “These record-setting third quarter revenue figures reflect marketers’ trust in the internet’s power to connect with today’s audiences.” IAB said the Q3 revenue is estimated based on a sample of overall survey respondents. The survey includes online ad revenue from websites, commercial online services, free email providers and others.

Guidance to help shift digital video ads to HTML5 and JavaScript formats, which are considered default media playback options in many browsers, was released Tuesday by the Interactive Advertising Bureau Technology Laboratory. “The move from Flash to HTML5 and JavaScript is vital to improving user experience in digital video advertising,” said IAB Tech Lab General Manager Alanna Gombert in a news release. “We recognize that it’s a complex transition -- one that cannot happen overnight. This guidance provides practical insights and how-to’s that simplify and facilitate the process for publishers, brands, and media agencies, as we build a stronger foundation for video marketing.” The lab also is providing one checklist for agencies and brands, and another for publishers that provide customized best practices as they make the transition over the next six months. It's recommending all video ads be in HTML5 by July. The release said tools such as a Video Ad Serving Template Validator and a JavaScript Video Player-Ad Interface Definition tester will be released in January to help with the transition.