• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, September 28, 2016

Tapad, a provider of cross-device marketing technology, on Wednesday announced a new metric for cross-device marketers it calls Viewable Exposure Time (VET) that measures across screens and ad formats, identifying the optimal amount of time consumers spend with an ad before they take action.

Frequency caps are currently used to ensure that budgets aren’t wasted on redundant ads. The VET metric aims to evolve the frequency capping approach to include accelerating a consumer’s ad exposure rate up to the optimal time spent with the brand. VET can be used in affinity, digital transaction, and offline purchase models as an indicator of the effectiveness of marketing dollars. Marketers in the consumer packaged goods, auto, telecom, and retail categories are using the metric in beta.

Viewable Exposure Time unifies and upgrades marketers’ predictors of advertising success by leveraging cross-screen engagement across digital and television, with vendor-agnostic viewability scores for video, rich media and display.

“The industry is in need of better measurement as capabilities evolve. Just like consumers fill their days across screens, we need a metric that can span TV, digital, mobile, desktop, video, and banners,” Tapad's SVP of Media Business, Kate O'Loughlin told  Real-Time Daily.  “VET helps us measure the connection across consumer ‘moments,’ ultimately to help us figure out what the right mixes and channels are that need to work together to drive consumer action."

O’Loughlin said that existing measurement options like click-through rate (CTR) and TV gross ratings points (GRP) “tell an incomplete story.” She said the company aims to measure what matters most to marketers. Tapad said it will also account for time spent with ads in viewable seconds and minutes. Such analytics inform marketers about which audiences are underexposed, enabling them to adjust campaigns and optimize viewable exposure time.