Advertisers are paying for stuff that isn’t seen, publishers are making money off false pretences and media buyers are pumping out billions of ads without much knowledge of where exactly they are going. It’s time for a serious debate, says Dominic Mills.
It sounds contradictory to talk of viewability in terms of a ‘space’ to be owned, but bear with me.
Like adblocking, viewability is a debate the industry must engage in – but up to now has been slow to tackle. The catalyst is the announcement last week by the IAB of a new viewability standard: that half of one ad must been seen for one second for it to count as viewable.
Forget, for a moment, whether this a reasonable definition; I have no dogmatic view, but as a punter I guess a one-second view of even half an ad might be enough for it to register, subject to it being in the right place, having the right message and some decent creative.
And, for the record, let’s just observe that this is very welcome: depending on who you talk to, somewhere between 40% and 50% of all ads served up – and often counted as an impression, therefore leading to money changing hands – are not viewable.
Its effect on the eco-system is therefore significant: advertisers paying for stuff that isn’t seen; publishers making money off false pretences; and, not least, the media buyers pumping out billions of ads through their trading desks without much knowledge of where exactly it is going and their effect.
How can the big trading desks ensure viewability when the transaction process takes place across millions of pages in milliseconds?”
All of this has contributed to a steady diminution of trust, all the more so as digital positions itself as a brand-building medium. You could argue that, so long as advertisers were paying on the basis of a cost-per-acquisition model, or by click-throughs, none of this mattered too much – apart from being a waste of time and effort.
But as more advertisers use digital for brand-building and move to different payment models – CPM, obviously – it does matter.
Nevertheless, even with the IAB initiative, viewability is a concept fraught with difficulties: location matters – how far up or down the page; so does context – a leaderboard on one page may be less viewable if the content the reader wants is further down; and user experience – how the publisher organises the content so as to achieve maximum utility for the reader.
And that’s before we even get to real-time bidding. How can the big trading desks ensure viewability when the transaction process takes place across millions of pages in milliseconds?
So there are plenty of areas still to explore and debate. But the entities best placed to move it forward must surely be the trading desks because they sit between the advertisers and the media owners.
As a market proposition for the trading desks too it makes sense, given that it provides a clear mark of differentiation for the otherwise homogenous slodge that constitutes the trading desks. Publicis’s Vivaki seems to be making the most running at the moment – as you can see from this four-page advertorial – sorry, native advertising concept – on AdAge earlier this month.
Now there’s some stuff in there that makes you giggle, such as when CEO Frank Voris defines veiwability as “an opportunity for a marketer to have a brand-safe interaction with the consumer that is relevant and adds meaning or value to their day.”
The current IAB standard is 50% viewability for two seconds – which is ridiculous.”
Huh? Why can’t these people speak straight? I view lots of ads that don’t, frankly, add anything to my day.
Or how about this one, from Phil Shih: “We define viewability as another measurement or signal that’s available to digitally reflect the propensity for an ad to be actually viewed by a human being.”
WTF? I lost the will to live on that one.
But actually, the Vivaki guys make some good points, and for once I feel like I’m seeing a desk trying to be open and honest about the issues. By talking about the problems, and potential new metrics like cost-per-viewable, they’re encouraging publishers and advertisers to respond.
Of course, not everyone sees it like that, and there’s a good piece here on Newsline from Adloox’s Marco Ricci arguing that the real issue remains transparency.
But you have to start somewhere and Vivaki’s line is that this is about collaboration with other players. It’s true that it can’t set the world right on its own, but someone has to take the lead.
Talking of which, next up is video viewability, which may be an even bigger problem area – or certainly will be so long as the amount of ad money going its way increases. The current IAB standard is 50% viewability for two seconds – which is ridiculous.
I know we live in a Snapchat or Vine age, but this seems to me to completely misunderstand how video ads work and how users interact with the medium and the buying process. A two-second view, especially given the brand sign-off is at the end, constitutes a skip to me.
According to research by Vindico last year, 57% of video ads are placed where they can’t be seen. Since most video is bought on a CPM basis, that made the cost 130% higher than it should have been.
Of course Vindico is talking its own book – the solution, wouldn’t you guess, is to use its AdTricity platform – but nevertheless there is a serious problem here to be addressed.
More debate, please.
