Commentary

Conviva's New Tool Tackles Ad Fatigue

Conviva today is unveiling Ad Insights, a pretty radical refashioning of how it thinks publishers should be looking at the ads on their sites. It's basically saying consumers don't want to be disappointed or annoyed. And it claims it can measure that with precision. 

We'll see.

In short, as millions are proving by using ad blockers, those messages are part of publishers’ environments, for better or, lots of times, for worse.  

Ads can be buffered or broken, and audiences lost. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

The new Ad Insights builds on Conviva's Experience Insights solution and lets publishers and advertisers figure out an engagement bottom line essentially.  Ad Insights measures ad engagement and quality of experience and viewer retention to answer a basic question: Does that ad keep viewers around, or for many reasons, repel them. What about the Website itself?  It can give the results in real time.

But the answers are kind of known already. Conviva says ad fatigue causes more than half the churn on Websites. The audience votes with their mouse.

Conviva is announcing today that, working with FreeWheel, it  will monitor ad impressions in real-time, reporting user experience and engagement metrics for both video advertising and content.

Keith Zubchevich, Conviva’s chief strategy officer, said the data to monitor an ad’s impact is available, and hardly ever used.  “Publishers have never thought this this way. They never thought they had to,” he said.  They don’t ask, or don’t bother to find out, if the ads placed on their sites, turn off viewers because of where they are, or how often they appear.

They could find out that users are saying, “Sorry, I’m not sticking around for this mid-roll ad.”

That could mean, ultimately, that the content around it isn’t perceived to have much value. That’s a good way to go out of business.

Zubchevich argues it’s the quality of the entire experience that keeps a viewer around,  not the quality of the service because consumers have come to believe there’s no reason to be getting buffering or second-class picture.  “ Quality of experience has a direct impact on engagement,”  he says, and now Conviva thinks it has the tools assembled to prove that sad, but obviously true fact.

pj@mediapost.com

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