‘Treat the disease, not the symptoms’: How the industry can get to grips with viewability
As publishers, media agencies and marketers continue to grapple with viewability, a panel of experts urges the industry to get on with finalising a solution.
While viewability has been kicking around as an issue for the Australian market for the past couple of years, there is growing consensus it is high time the industry got its act together and came up with some agreed rules for everyone to play by.
“I think there’s a common theme here that we all think this is a box that’s checked and so we can move onto brand safety and effectiveness,” says Hugo Drayton, the CEO of Inskin Media, summing up the sentiment of a panel he moderated on the issue at Mumbrella360.
Viewability is simply defined as the opportunity for a human being to see a display ad on a web page. Despite the simple nature of the problem, different agencies, publishers and marketer groups have their own definitions of what constitutes a view, much to the frustration of each group.
The widely held consensus is around a standard produced from the Interactive Advertising Bureau in the US, which defined a view as at least 50% of an ad appearing for at least one second on the user’s screen.
As IAB Australia CEO Vijay Solanki points out, viewability is ultimately just one metric marketers need to get right to be measuring the effectiveness of their advertising.
He says: “Viewability is one variable that drives great marketing outcomes, and we mustn’t let go of that. It’s really important, I think of it as an opportunity to see.
“It is not a measure of effectiveness, and we mustn’t let go of all the other variables that drive great marketing outcomes.”
OMD Sydney’s managing director Yvette Mayer, recently returned from five years in the US, admits while they accept the IAB’s definition as a baseline metric, she is frustrated at the way that definition was reached.
“I don’t think anyone would agree it is scientifically proven to be an accurate metric,” she says. “In the US when they came up with it as a metric I know for a fact it was a decision by committee, and there were no analytics or data used.
“It feels like a miss to me that we have so much information and access to data that we could model to find a more realistic point of quality.”
Mayer says her agency has been using a new buying metric, viewable CPMs, to get a better handle on the performance of an ad.
“Viewable CPMs are interesting and very much something to look at,” she explains.
“I think that is more important than trying to aim at 100% viewability. Understanding how much you’re paying and how many impressions were of quality in your buy is a great optimisation metric, and is something we can do now in real time through our programmatic desk.”
Programmatic is often a channel that is blamed for poor performance in terms of viewability for publishers. However Mayer says their internal tracking suggests that programmatic ad buys are slightly more viewable than those bought direct from a publisher.
Solanki agreed, revealing a forthcoming study from the IAB and PwC on viewability would show premium programmatic buys – those targeting the best available product on an advertiser’s website – way outperform the non-premium buys.
Nathan Powell, director of sales – digital product for the Nine Digital, says all publishers need to sign up to third-party auditing of their performance to ensure there is a level playing field for marketers to make buying decisions.
He explains: “There are multiple conversations, that’s why it’s important as an industry to make sure we’re all being measured from the same score card. I don’t think anyone should be able to mark their own homework, and if I am a marketer it is the only way I can make an informed decision on a like-for-like basis across my buys.
“The one thing I will add there for those clients that have different ways of buying on different measurement standards is just be upfront and transparent with publishers and agency partners, it’s about making sure you are clear about what success looks like and what the benchmark is. And when everyone involved knows what that is, we can actually create a solution for you.”
Drayton describes third-party tracking as “simple accountability, not rocket science”.
There is another element which determines the success of campaigns, the creative product.
Inskin’s Drayton points out recent research conducted by the company shows the importance of strong creative for the performance of the campaign.
“The thing with viewability is the thresholds are very very good at predicting whether an ad will have an opportunity to be seen, but very very bad at predicting how much attention it will gain,” he says.
Drayton adds: “Absolute attention is driven by the campaign, the format and especially the creative execution.
“Our concern is in a world of advertising and marketing where we need to be absolutely brilliant and grab attention, there’s a tendency to subjugate the creative in the quest for efficiency and programmatic delivery, and we think that is extremely dangerous.
“Along with the format it is the creative execution that determines the success of a campaign with visual engagement. Investing in creativity is a massive positive boost for campaign effectiveness.”
But as Nine’s Powell points out: “I think we have the maths men and the mad men balance wrong. We’re almost at the point where we can target an individual on a personal basis, but if you look at the creative we’re creating we may as well have been targeting the whole internet.”
Ultimately then viewability appears to be a discussion that is wearing down people from all sides of the debate, and an area the IAB’s Solanki feels Australia could become a global leader in, encouraging other industry bodies to work with them to create a more compelling set of standards for all players to stand behind.
As Nine’s Powell says: “There’s a really easy approach to all this, and that’s to treat the disease and not the symptoms. How we do that is by creating great products, and if we as a publisher do that then everything else will fall into place.”
Viewability this do you really mean monetise? Let’s hope you have learnt by now that Commercial TV programmes have become saturated with adverts and promos, so short sighted, and as such viewers are turning off and using PVR’s just to avoid the clutter. Don’t kill the digital golden goose.
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