Despite its best intentions, ISBA’s focus on viewability may actually deepen the adtech swamp, writes Bountiful Cow’s Chris Andrews
We believe in reintegrating creative and strategy, because creative ideas are a better long-term currency than pinching profit through hidden margins on media, something I’m sure everyone would agree with. No-one sets out to hide money from clients and irritate their customers. We want to grow clients’ brands, and good clients pay good money for good ideas.
Things you’d expect any integrated agency to say but we’ve put ourselves on the side of the advertiser to align our outcomes with theirs. That’s why, alongside sister agency the7stars, Bountiful Cow was first to fully adopt ISBA’s agency contract.
But while we agree on transparency, we disagree on viewability.
At its recent annual conference, ISBA’s director general, Phil Smith (pictured), called for advertisers “to be given the facility to buy digital display at 100% in view,” compared to the current global threshold of 50% set by the Media Rating Council (MRC).
It’s an understandable call. But I fear with this focus, ISBA risks deepening the swamp they’re trying to drain.
An identity crisis in the digital world
At the simplest level, online measurement is just pieces of code telling other pieces of code what other pieces of code have done or not done. If a viewability platform saw its code fire when an ad was in view, it means ‘someone’ saw the ad.
But how do you define ‘someone’. Online we’re just blobs of ones and zeroes. 52% of the internet is bots, and unless you squint, or have a platform that can verify with authority (for instance AdForm’s takedown of Hyphbot) you probably won’t notice the difference.
This identity crisis extends to publishers. News UK found around £1m worth of ‘their’ inventory on sale despite a temporary withdrawal from the market. The FT found 25 ad exchanges misrepresenting access to their inventory. The proactivity of publishers and initiatives such as the ads.txt standard is starting to help. But if you can spoof what a website looks like to a buyer, you can probably also spoof what a viewable impression looks like – there’s no silver bullet.
[advert position=”left”]
The ultimate aim of making sure an ad that’s been paid for is actually seen by a human is an important one, and technical innovations like blockchain and regulatory instruments like GDPR may also help to correct the problem in time. But until then viewability is the wrong starting point as there’s no guarantee that the view was human or the publisher was real.
Unnecessary scarcity creates fake value, which incentivises bad behaviour
There’s only so many viewable impressions a publisher can deliver, and higher viewability thresholds further reduce the supply of quality – by which I mean inventory from trusted media brands with reliable audience data and an uncluttered user-experience.
This creates an extra premium in a market where there’s already scarcity on quality – which will further incentivise fraudsters to fake views, spoof websites, and fake viewability metrics – as the margins are higher.
Scarcity in quality will also further incentivise bad buying behaviour. Buyers will prioritise viewability over context. Would you sooner be just below the fold on the Guardian (or even the mighty Arseblog) or in the top three slots on Urban Dictionary? I’ve seen some hilarious 100% share of voice, highly viewable ‘takeovers’ on the latter that I’m not entirely sure too many clients would be pleased with.
Buyers already prioritise volume over timing, with clients wanting reach-at-all costs yet lowest-possible-price. We’ve all seen odd marketing decisions being made with discretionary budgets at the end of the financial year as the fear of ‘use it or lose it’ draws closer. I suspect this psychology is behind the big sales spikes we see in platforms towards the end of the month – deferred purchasing as the reality of the buy gets further away from the shape of the plan.
Finally, further scarcity in quality will incentivise bad publisher behaviour. The only way you can guarantee a human sees an ad is to give them absolutely no choice in the matter. Viewability has already created a perverse incentive for intrusive advertising that has ruined user experience with formats such as aggressive autoplay video and disruptive interstitials to name but two.
Blunt force trauma to deliver a message doesn’t work and viewability-at-all-costs is diminishing our chance to define what great brand work looks like online because it’s turning people off to the message – and turning on adblockers.
ISBA could do more to incentivise the creation of better briefs
Beyond the technological concerns, viewability also fails to consider whether an ad had any positive impact on brand perception or any tangible outcome.
This is in no way to diminish viewability as a guide, and the work companies such as Integral, MOAT, and DoubleVerify have done here has helped. I would always be suggesting to improve viewability where at all possible. But right now, on balance, a 100% viewable ad would have a greater chance of being reputationally damaging for all parties than it has to be positive.
Without a reliable, consistent standard of measurement in display or an understanding of its role, we fall back on false incentives that bear no relation to user behaviour in the real world. We reach for the click, by far the laziest, most asinine measure to ever disgrace a display plan. Just because it’s valid for search does not make it valid elsewhere.
I’d like to see more advertiser briefs that set targets for high-share-of-voice alongside measures that reward great user experience. Companies like Integral Ad Science, for example, has a product that measures ‘ad clutter’ which I’d say is a decent proxy for quality – who wants to be on a page with 20 other ads? We all have a role here in setting better baseline benchmarks.
Chris Andrews is digital instrumentalist at Bountiful Cow
