• by Tobi Elkin , Staff Writer @tobielkin, December 8, 2015

Today's RTBlog is Part II of 2016 predictions by Art Muldoon and Matt Greitzer, co-founders of Accordant Media, which helps marketers organize and analyze their customer data, and deploy targeting strategies through programmatic media channels.

Prior to launching Accordant, Muldoon was SVP, Sales and Marketing for Global Data Platforms at Aegis Media/Isobar, while Greitzer was a board member of Publicis’ Vivaki Nerve Center and a VP at Razorfish where he ran the agency’s trading desk.

Here’s part II:

5. Viewability metrics continue to be confusing.

Muldoon: Viewability is going to continue to be very confusing. Different vendors are providing different information, and it’s driving marketers nuts. But I think it’s going to evolve into an understanding among marketers that viewability has different levels and value, and it becomes a useful metric based on a yield curve. Then it will become apparent that there are different options — including tradeoffs in some places — to suit different marketers’ objectives.

Greitzer: Hopefully, there will be more standardization around the numbers in 2016, but the conversation around viewability will still be a little muddled next year.

Three things will happen: 1) Publishers will design sites around viewability, which will drive metrics up; 2) Buyers will optimize toward predicted viewability numbers, so you’ll start to see better price rationality around viewable versus non-viewable inventory; and 3) As a result of these developments, marketers will start to make real economic calculations about how much viewability is worth to them. That relates to Art’s point about the yield curve.

It will probably take more than a year for all of this to shake out.

6. There will be fewer, but better, ads.

Muldoon: I think two things are going to happen in lockstep. There will be an increased focus on quality, which means fewer — but better — ads will be placed on sites. This will lead to a cleaning up of the way advertising loads and is displayed, ultimately making it more appealing for the consumer.

Concurrently, it will become clearer to consumers that there is an economic exchange between advertising and content. More sites will experiment with blocking visitors who are using ad-blockers. I fully believe ad-supported content will prevail.

Greitzer: I agree. Ultimately, publishers have the most to lose here. They’re going to have to align behind a solution, or a set of solutions, to make explicit the trade-off between advertising and consumer access to content. The Interactive Advertising Bureau is actively working with publishers to give them tools they can use to communicate with their audiences about the effect of ad-blockers.

7. Private marketplaces take hold.

Greitzer and Muldoon: Private marketplaces are going to continue to accelerate in 2016, as more and more buyers look for ways to get out of the open exchanges and leverage relationships. The growth of programmatic is really a story of the migration from the hand-sold buy to the automated buy, and private marketplaces are the programmatic equivalent of a hand-sold deal. An increase in the number of private marketplaces is inevitable as more buyers and sellers use programmatic media.