• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, July 24, 2014

What’s wrong with the industry’s ad viewability standards? For one, there’s too many of them, panelists agreed during OMMA’s RTB conference, on Thursday. Jared Lake, Director of Digital Media at Hawthorne Direct, counts about six standards, some of which yield wildly different viewability rates. Citing some data he recently came across, one standard put an ad’s viewability rate at 38%, while another gave the same ad a rate of 88%. Yvonne Abt, VP, Partner, Portfolio Management at UM Worldwide, said it’s a big problem. Viewability is “still not standardized … [and] not even close in video,” she said. How has the industry survived this long without a clear understanding of this critical metric? It’s simply been priced into the system, said Edwin Lee, VP of Strategy at MediaMath. “We’re already used to having ads not be viewable,” he said. Sure, that depresses pricing as noted by senior Forrester analyst Susan Bidel -- but, said Lee, that’s been the norm.