Viewability Complexity Stalls vCPM Model

by Dominic Finney , Op-Ed Contributor, January 7, 2016

An industry-wide de facto standard that can verify the viewability of online ads is essential if advertisers aren’t to lose trust.

The more standards, or quasi standards, an industry has the more problems it faces, and this appears to be the quagmire that the digital advertising industry has got itself stuck in.

Online ad spending may be increasing exponentially, but at the same time advertisers have a growing concern that that they can’t actually verify the viewability of their ads. They don’t know who is viewing the ads they are paying for, with non-standard ads being poorly tracked by current standards and vendor offerings.

It isn’t the concept of buying and selling viewable ads that is being called into question. This makes absolute sense. The problem is that the industry can’t come to any sort of agreement on what viewable actually means, which is leaving advertisers perplexed.

In a bid to set standards, the Media Rating Council (MRC), with input from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), came up with a set of guidelines it hoped would be the basis for a de facto standard and an online ad buying currency for the future.

According to the MRC and the IAB, a display ad is viewable if 50% or more of its pixels appear on-screen for at least one continuous second. A video ad is viewable if 50% of its pixels appear on-screen for at least two consecutive seconds. The IAB has now gone a step further and said that publishers should aim to guarantee a 70% ad viewability figure.

The ability for marketers to independently verify viewability rates across multiple publishers using one standard has to be the way to go.

The MRC now has 15 accredited vendors, but astonishingly has yet to accredit any third-party technology to track mobile ad viewability. Viewability metrics vary from vendor to vendor, making it impossible for marketers to actually track how their ads are performing, especially where ads are non-standard. With various derivatives of stats flying around, you can see why some marketers are tearing their hair out.

A lack of transparency in viewability has become a major beef among advertisers. Despite automation and standardization, discrepancies are still large.Respondents to a study we carried out for an advertising technology company found that inconsistency of measurement across vendor solutions was at the crux in producing real inconsistencies in viewability scores.

In an industry concerned with justifying ad spend with understandable results, accurate measurement metrics for online advertising have for some reason been a hurdle too far. No one is expecting the viewability model to be fixed overnight. But the industry has got to come up with a common standard to rebuild trust in the digital marketplace. It is in the best interest of the digital media industry, so the faster it happens the better.

2 comments about "Viewability Complexity Stalls vCPM Model".

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Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, January 7, 2016 at 9:35 a.m.
Agreed, Dominic, but I suspect that the real reason that digital ad sellers are dragging their feet on this is their desire to protect their revenue streams. If really objective and tight research studies were conducted comparing some form of "verified" or "proven" ad message recall, at various "viewability" thresholds, the likely outcome would be that there was very little recall when the ads can't be seen almost or totally in their entirety. If this proved to be the case, it would casue advertisers to insist on 100% viewability ---at least for video ads----and all at once a typical seller might lose up to 75% of his/her "impressions"---these being deemed non existant or nearly worthless. The impact of that outcome on CPMs and ad revenues is not hard to imagine. You can't simply triple or quadruple your CPMs to recoup the lost audience value and expect the advertiser to pay five or ten times the cost of "reaching" a TV viewer by using digital video ads. Some may do so but many wont.

I continue to maintain that the only solution is for digital video selers to accept the 100% visibility metric and adjust their ad scheduling practices and pricing accordingly. You can't redefine ad exposure for digital without considering the obvious alternative---namely TV which offers 100% visibility and has its established CPM structure. You are not operating in a vacuum.
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Dominic Finney from Theorem Inc, January 8, 2016 at 6:01 a.m.

Yes, to an extent price is a key seller concern in thatm will the CPM increase in line with improved viewability performance is still very uncertain and therefore sellers are unclear what impact it will have on there commercial model and performance. But the much bigger concern is the accuracy of the reporting market wide, as without this sellers may well be penalised both for being measured against viewability reports that are inaccurate and just as importantly that are not setup accurately across ad formats and devices so they also miss out on the opportunity to demonstrate the increased value in terms of viewability there inventory may well be delivering.

On Ad recall my concern is that this isn't being conducted on a market wide scale, so what impact it will have is pure speculation at the moment, when rather we should be working towards an agreed market standard that should then provide resultant benchmarks. And as a by product of this gap, the market is disproportionately focusing on the viewability metric which ultimately should just be a key hygiene metric to ensure an Ad is viewed, and to then let buyers and seller get on with the real business at hand which is what value the Ad delivered against the client's brand KPIs.

What this all tells us is that there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of standards and vendors, which is desperately needed as it is already having a tangible impact on the market..