• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, May 10, 2016

Viewability is perhaps the most-buzzed-about metric. Now mobile video mediation platform AerServ and Moat, a SaaS analytics platform, on Tuesday announced a partnership that will develop a complementary metric: attention. AerServ will work with Moat to measure attention as well as human traffic and viewability across digital ad programs.

The deal integrates AerServ’s mobile monetization product with Moat Analytics. The integration will also enable publishers to more easily support audience targeting, which advertisers can optimize as part of a viewability-driven campaign.

“Most industry experts mistakenly co-mingle mobile in-browser video with mobile in-app video. Moat is one of the only vendors to offer a solidified in-app video solution and is a well-respected leader for in-app viewability,” claims Josh Speyer, CEO of AerServ, in an email to Real-Time Daily.

Speyer explained that the mobile Web and mobile app experience are different in terms of user consumption, access to data, technology, pricing, performance, integration types and inventory quality. “We’ve seen buyers fail to differentiate between the two, lumping them together into a generic mobile video bucket, or not realizing they’re buying primarily mobile Web video, where inventory tends to be less expensive.”

By bringing human traffic, viewability and attention metrics together, AerServ believes that advertisers and publishers using its technology will improve the effectiveness of their programmatic direct campaigns by ensuring that advertisers’ creative is reaching real vs. non-human, attentive users.

The partnership comes on the heels of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) “Primer for Publishers on Improving Ad Viewability” report that came out in late March. The digital ad industry has placed an increasing amount of emphasis on viewability as a baseline metric for digital advertising performance.