• by Ryan Pamplin , May 1, 2015

Out of the billions of digital video ad impressions measured each year, about one in four are presented below the fold, muted or stuffed inside of display banners. This represents millions of dollars of waste across the industry.

On the plus side, there are tools available to detect and eliminate much of this waste. One of the challenges for advertisers will be holding their media partners accountable to ensure that they can leverage these tools.  

Viewability culprits

One reason for the ongoing viewability issue is due to a lack of standards. Although we have the IAB standard and MRC accreditation for viewability, agency holding groups are still creating their own standards, and measurement vendors are reporting wildly inconsistent viewability metrics.

In other words, it isn’t truly standardized.  

Another reason is a lack of infrastructure. A sizeable portion of digital video inventory doesn’t have the infrastructure to inject JavaScript code, which makes it technically impossible to deploy technologies that can measure viewability. Many savvy advertisers seek to avoid this non-transparent inventory, but it’s hard to avoid holdouts like Hulu, YouTube and Facebook.

Publishers limit advertisers

When digital video ads are served using VAST (Video Ad-Serving Template), it’s impossible to determine viewability. The better solution is VPAID, which enables the injection of code to measure for viewability and more.

VPAID (Video Player-Ad Interface Definition) is the IAB’s effective set of standards for the communication between video players and video ad servers. And like most things in life, better communication can lead to better results.

Through VPAID, advertisers can engage third-party technology vendors to measure everything from viewability to brand lift. VPAID opens the door for groundbreaking new capabilities, such as in-video surveys, which yield unprecedented response rates for audience and effectiveness measurement.

Given the benefits for advertisers when a publisher supports VPAID, you’d expect everyone to be onboard, right?

Wrong. While the industry has made great strides in this area, about a third of U.S. online video ad inventory still isn’t VPAID-compliant. And a lot of the inventory that’s not VPAID-compliant lives on premium sites.

This means that many advertising campaigns are missing out on the opportunity to optimize out of placements and domains with poor viewability, and ultimately drive a better ROI.

 So why the reluctance?

Most premium publishers have more demand than supply, so they don’t have much incentive to upgrade to VPAID. This means that the pressure to change needs to come from advertisers.   

To that end, it’s important to remember that increasing transparency will instill confidence and fuel growth for the entire digital video ecosystem.

While the viewability issue remains vast, VPAID-compliance gives advertisers an opportunity to solve it.