Viewability is the most meaningful metric buyers have ever had – but it needs to be used wisely
It’s the best thing to have happened to digital media metrics, but focusing entirely on viewability at the expense of other metrics is a mistake, writes Wavemaker’s Greg Cattelain.
At last month’s Programmatic Summit in Sydney, a panel tackled the topic of “Kill the metrics that don’t matter”. At one point, the moderator asked each participant to nominate the two metrics they would “kill”.
One of the responses was “viewability and fraud”. I fell off my chair. The panelist justified their answer by saying viewability should be a given. But is it?
No matter what the medium. I am always in control. I can choose to change channel, radio station or turn a page. Switch on or off at will. Find something without ads (the ABC springs to mind). Choose to ignore something or not as I please.
“Viewability”. Yet another useless, idiot buzzword to justify something. Anything. Next thing along with “Crisis Evaluaters” we’ll have a CVO…
How fun living in 1980 must be David.
Viewability measurement allows for as you admit yourself, transparency like we’ve never seen before.
The days of blind buying TARPs off OzTAM data are over.
The quicker this can become standard across all of digital (along with IVT and ad fraud measurement) the quicker we can clean up our industry and continue growing buying efficiency and effectiveness.
Agree with Hank, David.
Please enlighten us with your alternative to provide transparency across our industry?
Isn’t it fun how insults are used to make a point. From people who are supposed to be “communicators” and expert “marketers”.
HA!
I do not come from the participation award generation David.
You spoke rubbish and it got responded to accordingly. Either build a thicker skin or get more intelligent opinions.
“100 percent viewability in isolation – and above all other metrics – could be the wrong thing to do.”
Greg is from Group M. Isn’t Group M’s viewability definition 100% in view for one second?
The GroupM 100% viewability product is impressions only on Outlook – arbitrage?
If the only objective is awareness, then I can see that perhaps it is more cost efficient to lower the viewability and work to a vCPM. However, if you are wanting to do any kind of attribution, or measure the performance of the display activity on website visits or actions (post view) then having anything short of the highest viewability makes working out which impressions actually made a difference impossible.
@Greg The lede would make more sense if it said “Viewability is the most meaningful DIGITAL metric buyers have ever had”. Though you may not have written the lede.
@Hank. Psssst. TV ads are 100% viewable. And yes I know people go make a coffee or go to the toilet in ad breaks. But I’ll let you in on a secret – people also do other things when digital ads are streamed.
@Hank again. One day you will learn that an ad served is not the same as an ad seen – especially when it is splashed around multiple devices in the spray and pray programmatic world.