As programmatic buying continues to rise, the level of online ad viewability has dropped noticeably over the last year, according to ad verification company Meetrics, with just 49% of online ads served in the UK meeting the IAB standard in Q2 2015.
The UK figure is down 7% year on year and is well below that of Germany (64%) and France (62%), where automated ad buying techniques, such as programmatic, are less dominant.
A recent IAB study showed that 45% of UK display ads were bought programmatically in 2014, up from 28% in 2013. The IAB predicts this will rise to 70-80% by 2018.
“There’s no doubt programmatic brings many benefits to advertisers but there’s a flip side to every coin,” said Anant Joshi, Meetrics’ director of international business.
“It’s certainly less transparent than buying directly and there’s also a big question mark about the quality of much of the inventory sold this way and, clearly, that most of it never ends up being seen.”
An ad is considered viewable if 50% of it is in view for at least 1 second, according to the IAB and Media Ratings Council, with Meetrics and IAB data suggesting that around £485 million was spent last year on display ads that weren’t seen.
[advert position=”left”]
“It’s vital that agencies, on behalf of their advertiser clients, demand more accountability from the vendors and middle men used to buy their media,” Joshi added.
“One way is to ensure any vendors are rubber-stamped by JICWEBS that they meet industry-agreed standards for online ad trading.”
The report also showed that ‘Leaderboards’ were the least viewable (40%) ad format whilst ‘Billboards’ (68%) and ‘Skyscrapers’ (60%) were the most viewable. For ads that met the 50%/1 second viewability rule, the average time these ads were in view was 29.5 seconds.
Commenting on the report, ISBA’s director of media and advertising, Bob Wootton, told Newsline: “This is interesting because it’s the first time I’ve seen decreasing online ad viewability so ostensibly linked with the steep rise in programmatic media buying.
“It’s bound to cause a row between different groups of tech evangelists – the content verification plays like Meetrics on one side and the wholesale automators of media buying on the other.”
Wootton added that the results also beg a big question: “What use is a super-efficient media buy that isn’t actually visible to its target? Or put differently, why, if automated media buying is so damn good is it actually turning out to be so bad?”
