What does MRC accreditation cover, and how do buyers check a claim?

What is MRC accreditation?

The Media Rating Council is a not for profit, self regulatory industry body. Its history page (opens in a new tab) traces it to the Harris Committee hearings on broadcast ratings in the early 1960s, when a congressional committee concluded that industry self regulation, including independent audits of rating services, was preferable to government intervention. The group formed then was called the Broadcast Rating Council and is now the MRC. Today it audits measurement across television, radio, out of home, print and digital.

The MRC states its mission in three parts on its mission page (opens in a new tab): to secure measurement services that are "valid, reliable and effective", to set minimum disclosure and ethical criteria for those services, and to run an audit system that tells users whether a measurement meets those criteria. That third part is what buyers meet in practice. An accreditation is the audit system's answer for one service at one point in time.

What does an MRC audit actually check?

The MRC describes its audit and accreditation process (opens in a new tab) as annual external audits of a measurement service's operations, performed by a specialized team of independent CPA auditors. The service has to supply complete information, comply with MRC Minimum Standards, submit to the annual audits and pay the audit costs. The audit reports are confidential among MRC members, the CPA firm and the service.

The Minimum Standards for Media Rating Research (opens in a new tab), last revised in December 2011, are the base layer. Accepting them is one of the conditions of accreditation. They are split into ethical and operational standards, disclosure standards, and supplementary standards for electronic delivery and third party processors. They require each service to try constantly to reduce the effects of bias, distortion and human error, and to document each change to the software that processes its data.

What does MRC accreditation not guarantee?

Accreditation claims go wrong when a narrow, audited scope is read as a general seal. The MRC's own materials draw the limits clearly once a buyer knows where to look. The list below sets out what an accreditation claim cannot be taken to mean.

• It does not cover the whole company. The MRC's digital list shows each accredited metric with its environments, such as desktop, mobile web, mobile in-app and connected TV, and footnotes that narrow it further by platform, placement type, language or method.
• It does not cover every supply source. A footnote on the MRC digital list reads "Not all metrics and environments are accredited for every supply source" and sends readers to the accreditation letter for the detail by supply source.
• It does not cover exported data. The Minimum Standards say exporting data from a delivery system takes manipulation outside the service's control, so "this activity will not be accredited."
• It does not cover a sister product. A company with one accredited service must label its other, non accredited services clearly, and the MRC accreditation symbol may not appear on reports outside an accredited service.
• It does not certify content. No MRC accreditation says a website, channel or campaign is safe or suitable for a brand. It says a measurement of that content was produced by an audited process.

Status during review is another trap. The MRC's services under review page (opens in a new tab) says plainly that services listed there "are currently not accredited by MRC." They may be at a pre audit stage, mid audit, or working through audit findings. A proposal that says a service is "in the MRC process" is describing an application, not an accreditation.

How can a buyer confirm an MRC accreditation claim?

A claim can be checked against public MRC documents. The MRC posts its accredited services by medium, attaches the most recent accreditation letter next to each one, and publishes a quarterly chart for large digital platforms. The digital platforms chart (opens in a new tab) updated July 9, 2026 tracks viewability, sophisticated invalid traffic, audience, content level brand safety, outcomes and the January 2026 auction transparency standard, and marks each cell as accredited, accredited for specific platforms, in process or not accredited.

Which MRC standards relate to brand safety?

Three MRC documents define what a brand safety or context accreditation can mean, and a fourth governs invalid traffic, which buyers may bundle into the same contract. The MRC's standards and guidelines page (opens in a new tab) lists them with their issue dates.

The 2012 guidelines (opens in a new tab) define site context as page or site attributes used to decide whether a page is an appropriate environment for the ad, "as determined by parameters set by the advertiser." They ask each verification service to keep and disclose its own avoidance categories, listing general types such as adult content, hate and profanity, and unmoderated user generated content. In its October 2025 policy letter (opens in a new tab), the MRC points out that those 2012 guidelines have no requirements for image, video or audio content and do not use the word safety at all.

The same letter lists what services accredited only at the property level must now disclose: that images, video and audio are excluded from measurement, with a direct disclaimer that this gives no content level brand safety assurance; when unclassified URLs are rolled up to a domain classification; their time to live and crawl rates; sampling and non sampling error; and any use of app store ratings or descriptions. A buyer can ask for each of those disclosures by name. The what is brand safety guide covers how the policy changed the industry's vocabulary.

Where does planning stage suitability review fit next to accredited measurement?

Accredited verification measures what happened once ads are served or bid on. Some suitability decisions are made earlier, when the planner decides which sites and channels belong on the list at all. That earlier decision is not something an MRC letter speaks to, so it needs its own evidence.