• by Matt Timothy , June 5, 2013

Warning:  silly concept ahead but stay with me.

You’ve discovered a nefarious plot whereby all the toasters in kitchens across the country are set to explode simultaneously at precisely 9:00 am. You have a week to inform 100 million households they need to unplug their bread burners. Cutting off the power source is the only way to prevent the programmed detonation. Your message is simple: Unplug your toaster and you will live.

You invest all your savings to create a 30-second spot, outlining clearly the need to unplug your toaster. There has never been a spot as important as this one.

You buy as much TV as you can. But since you have limited funds and your kids watch everything online, you decide to put a significant amount of your “Unplug!” budget into digital video. Let’s say it’s 20%.

A week passes, 20 million toasters exploded. It’s bad but could have been much worse.

Now the forensics: Your TV campaign reached a lot of people. The TV people who sold you the schedules give you Nielsen estimates of how many people saw your warning. The digital guys, on the other hand, said they delivered a huge amount of impressions. FBI scientists and agency analytics teams start to correlate how the message was delivered and the effective “unplug” rate.

TV was effective. Also, digital was effective, but illuminated a startling and unnerving fact: A large chunk of the “impressions” were manufactured. In short, there was no human viewer on the other side.

We learn that your crystal clear warning was run on 11,000 different sites, effectively the entire digital video marketplace.  Of those, only 200 were sites operated like TV.  Of all the sites your message ran on, only 0.005% of them were displayed on video-centric sites, with high quality content, a big, above-the-fold player and a view that was user-initiated.  

Another 800 sites were syndication partners of the first 200. On these 1,000 sites, there was a very high correlation between ad consumption and an unplugged toaster. That leaves roughly 10,000 sites that ran (or told you they ran) your warning.

The digital CSI team determined that these ads had no effect on increasing the number of unplugged toasters. The money spent here was wasted with each ineffective dollar representing a life not saved. Your heart breaks.

“Unplug!” ran on sites that had no video content. In an all-out effort to deliver on the high impression goals you were promised, a legion of digital sales outlets ran your life-saving message in a banner. As much as 30% of these entities ran your ad in a disposable banner that played automatically on the load of a page. This player was auto-muted. It also disappeared, evaporating after 30 seconds, leaving only a trail of pixels that proved it ran but can’t prove that it was seen.

It was on a page optimized with no organic traffic and no real content. Other sites crammed your spot in an invisible player, one pixel wide by one pixel tall. The list of digital chicanery goes on. Bottom line: you bought a boatload of viewer-less impressions, invented exclusively to get the seller and the site paid.

It’s a silly example but carries an important point.  We talk about verification and viewability in the growing digital video space. We talk about ensuring quality execution. TV does not need these words as tent poles of its business. Branded digital properties don’t need these terms. Both TV vendors and premium video digital counterparts have valuable brands to protect, which in turn ensures a high level of executional quality.

The long tail, lower-tier inventory players, which are feverishly looking for lucrative exits, are using the display playbook to fulfill video sales promises. So you have a sliver of the market playing by TV rules and a huge remainder under significant pressure from investors defaulting to the rules established in the two-dimensional display space.

We need to talk about the quality of the attention being delivered.  There is an unholy amount of fraud in the video marketplace. We need to reward the quality players and call out the thieves. We need to encourage more investment in programming and real audience building.

Advertisers invest a great deal of money in their creative and message, then hand it to TV outlets and premium digital vendors with a high degree of confidence. There are countless digital sales entities that exist in the shadow of their branded brethren and can get away with more than we, as an industry, should accept.  

In many ways, my example is not so silly. The jobs of these marketers relies on garnering real attention.  Our job is to help them get it. Their message is as important to them as your “Unplug!” campaign was to you.

So ask yourselves:  If your job depended on it, would you make the same buy again?