Creating a viewable ad standard for Internet advertisers is a mission everyone agrees on and should be quite simple. But the issue is raising hackles in the marketplace and causing confusion.
Advertisers are increasing their digital budgets to target consumers who are increasingly connected 24/7 via an array of devices, yet growing resentment in the media industry that viewability standards and measuring tools are inconsistent to measure advert viewing is rocking the boat.
After five consecutive years of double digit growth, European online advertising hit 30.7 billion euros in 2014, according to figures from IAB Europe. Mobile and video ad spend continued on strong growth curves and are now a significant proportion of display and search ad spend. But despite positive market feedback, things in the media industry garden are not all rosy.
The subject of viewability metrics is causing serious rifts in the industry. This all goes back to three years ago, when the ABI suggested a global de facto standard for viewable adverts. Previously, the industry relied on impressions which merely measured that an advert was load on a page regardless of whether it was actually viewable or not.
Following on from this, the Media Rating Council opted to accredit a group of third party technology vendors to track viewability. There are now 15 accredited vendors. It is impossible for media sellers to be compatible with 15 different systems. At the same time, when buyers and sellers use different combinations of these viewability measures it ends up being chaotic.
The market, however, opted to give the viewability measurement a chance, until Google issued a damning report saying that over half of display advert impressions never appeared on the screen, because they were below the fold, scrolled out of view or on the background tab. The IAB then came out and said that publishers should aim to guarantee that 70% of adverts they put out are viewable. The American Association of Advertising Agencies was quick to dismiss the figure. It said we should be looking at an immediate goal of 100% viewability. So the problem has rumbled on.
Playing field changing
Google recently announced that it was making sweeping changes to its display advertising network so that advertisers only pay for adverts that are 100% viewable. The move was thought by many to be a shrewd one to fight off ad blockers. But, it will also change the vista of online advertising.
Facebook has also entered the foray and said it will give marketers the option to pay only if an entire advert appears on a user’s screen or ‘viewpoint’. Thus an advertiser would not be charged if a user only scrolls to see 80% of the advert, for example.
Earlier this year Twitter began offering autoplay videos across its service, and said it would charge marketers only when a video advert is 100% in-view for at least 3 seconds
It isn’t only the industry heavyweights such as Google, Facebook and Twitter that are baulking at viewability stats. It is a cause for concern throughout the industry. In a recent study we carried out for ad tech firm InSkin Media, 50% of senior agency and publisher executives said they did not believe the viewability standards set by the IAB and Media Rating Council (MCR) are adequate. The figure spiked to 63% for large non-standard formats such as wallpaper and skins.
Respondents to the study said that inconsistency of measurement across vendor solutions was at the core of producing real inconsistencies in viewability scores. Of those FaR surveyed, it was rated as being key ( 8.3 out of 10 in terms of importance) to future digital marketing operations.
The viewability conundrum
The feeling is that the IAB’s viewability standard works only at a very basic level and does not work across all ad formats and platforms which means we are some way out from establishing standards and consistency of measurement tools to enable a vCPM model. In fact, 53% of industry panellists we surveyed said they didn’t think it would ever be possible for “all brand advertising” formats to be bought on a viewable impression basis.
Leadership needed
The viewability debate has seen some heated stand offs, but it is time for the industry to band together and address these discrepancies, or see the trust in online advertising be slowly torn apart.
The digital advertising business has been built on the concept that adverts get delivered to websites, rather than based on what adverts they were actually able to view. With the emergence of viewability standards and measurement the impression model has become outmoded, however, the fundamental industry challenge is that the solution can accurately or consistently measure viewablity!
The industry needs to aspire to a 100% viewability standard and a consistent measurement solution across vendors as matter of urgency as the current market solution is creating more challenges that solutions.
By Dominic Finney, MD at FaR Partners (a Theorem Digital company).
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