Debates around viewability and ad fraud continue to plague the digital advertising space in 2017, but thanks to data and technology improvements seen over the past few years, viewability metrics are bringing some order back to the programmatic advertising space, according to a recent panel of experts. Is it time to put the viewability debate to rest?
Viewability in digital advertising refers to the likelihood that an ad placed against a video, or on a Web page, is actually seen by the user. An ad may be placed at the bottom of a Web page, for example, and the user may never scroll down far enough to see the ad. So while the ad was technically served, it wasn’t necessarily viewed.
Programmatic ad buying, which has proliferated online and on mobile, is sitting center stage for the perennial debate about viewability in digital advertising, as programmatic platforms will continue to dominate in the online video space. “In the last five to six years, we’ve seen a boom in programmatic,” said Juan Suarez, who leads the Xaxis West office in Los Angeles, California. Xaxis is a media and technology platform, and one of the pioneers in programmatic advertising.
“In 2011, less than 5% of digital advertising was purchased through programmatic medium,” Suarez said. “Fast forward to today, and almost 60% of digital advertising has been purchased programmatically. We expect that, over the next two to three years, virtually all of digital media being purchased will be programmatic.”
The benefits of programmatic are clear to marketers and ad sellers alike: instantaneous, automated inventory buying and selling that helps improve efficiencies and, at least initially, reduced costs for media buyers. But Lucas Krump, director of demand partnerships at Brightroll, said programmatic has taken on a new role in recent years for digital advertisers. “There was a time when programmatic was synonymous with providing a brand with access to every publisher in the ecosystem via as many exchanges that a DSP (demand side platform) could plug into,” Krump said. “Over the course of the last three of four years, we’ve really moved away from DSPs buying across every source of inventory via an exchange.”
Viewability will continue to be a hot button issue for brands, marketers and media buyers as they continue to shift more advertising dollars to digital outlets in the coming year. But increasingly, media buyers are demanding viewability guarantees be built into advertising exchanges and platforms.
Krump noted that the industry has seen an overall reduction in the number of ad exchanges in recent years – and that’s in part because of increased emphasis on viewability and fraud concerns in the marketplace. “There’s lots of concerns about inventory quality and fraud,” he said. “More and more advertisers want the benefits of programmatic media buying with full transparency into what inventory they’re buying, and where their ads are being delivered.”
But marketers today have access to more granular data about how an ad is performing, which has helped them apply pressure to inventory sellers for guarantees that ads are being served – and seen. “2016 was when viewability became table stakes,” said Suarez. “In order to really legitimize programmatic, we needed the viewability metric. A wise man said an ad that’s not being seen by a human should not be paid for.”
Over the last year or so, outfits like the Media Rating Council (MRC) and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) have designed their own viewability metrics, in hopes of injecting some accountability into digital advertising. For MRC, an ad is deemed viewable if 50% of more of the pixels of the ad are visible to the user for at least one second on display ads and at least two seconds for video ads.
This dynamic has actually helped to raise inventory prices, Krump said. “The overall cost of inventory within exchanges —if it’s good quality inventory – has caused the price to actually rise,” Krump said. “Advertisers are using the technologies available in the market and third party verifications for viewability and fraud to essentially confirm that the site they’re delivering to is quality. And if it is, they’re willing to pay more for that.”
But viewability metrics doesn’t mean the debate has been closed entirely. It’s only been shelved. A report out last week from digital ad verification firm Meetrics found that some $752 million was lost to unviewable ads in 2016 around the globe. Meetrics estimates viewability for online adverts averaged 55% in Q3 2016 around the globe. There’s plenty of room for more debate and new approaches to viewability in 2017.
Still, Suarez said it’s time marketers and ad sellers begin to look at some of the other ways of measuring the effectiveness of an ad. “For 2017, the only risk I’ve seen is, have we focused too much on viewability as the only metric?” Suarez said. “In my view, it’s allowed other areas to be neglected, other areas of engagement and creative, and the quality of the ad and the quality of the audience becoming secondary and tertiary metrics because viewability has become such an engrained industry topic.”