• by Mitchell Reichgut , January 13, 2014

Earlier this year, TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson estimated that roughly 50% of video ads are actually viewable. Many of these video ad placements are hidden on pages that aren’t accessible to viewers. Advertisers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on video ads that will never be viewed by anyone, never mind relevant consumers.

To put this into perspective, imagine a brand spending a major budget to advertise on billboards along major highways. Instead, the vast majority of the ads appear on billboards in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Yes, the Mojave represents a significant area of land, but most of it is inaccessible, uninhabited, and miles away from the places where potential customers actually spend their time.

This is allowed to happen online because brand advertisers do not have the capacity to see where their ads are running. They choose partners based on opaque KPIs without an accurate view of where their ads will actually run or any insight on the quality of views.

The root cause of all this is an acute lack of quality inventory. Hulu, Vevo, and other premium publishers simply do not provide enough content to support the enormous demand for reach. Legacy advertisers are still used to the level of distribution television provided for decades, and the industry as a whole has not reconciled the difference.

Many videos, therefore, wind up being triggered by bots (hijacked computers), running on file lockers (highly trafficked sites that run illicit versions of major TV shows and films), or being placed within pop-unders, below-the-fold units, or in other non-visible areas.

The ad viewability problem is compounded by the fact that there is no industry standard for video ad effectiveness. And, as viewers continue to migrate toward mobile apps, the ad-hoc standards used for browser-based consumption grow more outdated each day.

The IAB, MRC, and others are already at work on developing new standards, but it won’t be enough. Advertisers must take matters into their own hands by demanding a higher level of accountability.

One simple way to do this is to require complete site lists, rather than representative samples. In other words, advertisers need to say, “I’m not spending a dime with you unless you can tell me exactly where and how my videos are going to be viewed.”

If one major advertiser set this standard, the rest of the industry would soon follow suit.

In my opinion, advertisers have the right to know exactly where their videos are going to run. They have the right to know how their videos will be presented, and where they will be placed on each page.

The industry is more than capable of delivering on these basic tenets. As advertisers get serious about their online video investments, I predict they will be the ones to make it happen.