Visible Measures is announcing this morning that the Media Rating Council (MRC), which certifies media measurement services, has accredited a number of the company's metrics, including its "TrueReach Views," a metric that spans paid, owned and earned media. Brian Shin, Visible Measures' founder and CEO, told me last week that it's the first time a metric has been accredited that covers all of the ways a brand's video campaign can now be propagated online.

Brian noted that the accreditation is also unusual for the MRC because it typically audits metrics that are tied to conventional ad serving. Conversely, in the case of TrueReach, MRC took account of social activity for the first time, requiring it to verify that Visible Measures' technology and methodologies accurately reflected viral distribution properly. Brian said that MRC did sample testing and vetted its documentation as part of the accreditation process.

The accreditation means that brands now have a trusted, comprehensive metric for understanding how video campaigns perform online. Brands now commonly air their ads on TV and/or seed the web with them and then stoke social sharing, in turn leading to huge incremental viewing. These bonus views are referred to as earned media and are a key part of a campaign's ROI. The latest example of this phenomenon was the Super Bowl ads, which drove tens of millions of online views, strengthening the ROI of the original spend. Brian explained that brands are working hard to capitalize on earned media opportunities, and the TrueReach metric gives them a certified way of understanding their results.  

While TrueReach can't be thought of as a sole industry "standard," it is an important building block in helping the advertising ecosystem better gauge viewers' new behaviors. Just yesterday I wrote that the advertising industry is experiencing a "measurement crisis" as it grapples with trying to keep pace with all of the new ways that consumers are watching premium video content and advertising. The industry is struggling to measure cross-platform viewership and has a number of initiatives underway.

Beyond the MRC accreditation, Brian said that Visible Measures grew revenues almost 500% last year, while almost tripling its headcount to almost one-hundred. Brian sees the company as being squarely at the intersection of huge trends in online video, social media, analytics and advertising innovation with lots of growth ahead.