• by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, March 16, 2017

It might be self-serving and the results may be have been a little obvious, but the household name publishers who form the World Media Group have used Moat's metrics service to prove a point. If you stick with responsible publishers who pride themselves on decent journalism, you get a far better result than spraying money around on ad networks.

The World Media Group is a who's who in transatlantic quality journalism. Although the mainstream newspapers in the UK don't play a part, The Economist is a member, and then there is the likes of The Washington Post, Fortune, The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and Forbes. It is open about the motive for commissioning the research. The group wants to join in the transparency, fraud and viewability debate currently raging between brands, agencies and publishers to show how much better results are if you buy from a reputable source.

To give you a flavour of the findings, mobile display viewability among the group's titles is 40% above an industry-wide benchmark and user attention is held for 12% longer. There is a 17% improvement in desktop display viewability with readers engaged for 25% longer, and with video there's a 21% viewability increase.

By far the biggest uplift comes in measuring when a a human being has elected to turn on the sound and watched at least half of a video ad (for a maximum of 15 seconds). Here there was a 92% lift against the benchmark that Moat sees across the industry.

It's interesting because the figures coincide with Google saying that transparency is best served by moving beyond price and concentrating a little more on value. Google is, of course, pretty much the antithesis of the World Media Group. It concentrates on people bidding as low as possible to get as much coverage as they can. So it looks like Google is pointing out you can't have your cake and eat it. This low cost, far reach approach is not conducive to high viewability rates. This is exactly the same message that the World Media Group insists.

It's timely research because not only does it tap into the debate around transparency and viewability, but it speaks to the brand safety conversation too. If you were told that cheap programmatic network "spray and pray" strategies were not as good as advertising with a quality publisher, the cynic might say that's to be expected and you can get around it by just buying a lot more of the cheap stuff and still get noticed. The point is, however, that buying blind on price can get you into trouble. Just look at the outrage as some advertisers inadvertently being seen to support extremist videos on YouTube.

Buying direct with reputable publishers not only boosts performance, but you can assume that it provides far better brand protection than throwing your budget into the four winds and seeing where it lands. There is a change of attitude starting to form out there. The value and performance of digital marketing is being actively considered now alongside its ability to offer some very low-cost avenues to market. Simply drawing attention to sites that invest in decent journalism and how their advertising performs way above industry benchmarks has to be a good thing for anyone who wants quality publishing to prosper in today's fragmented media landscape. 

The research reminds digital marketers that they really can't have that proverbial slice of cake and eat it. "Spray and pray" will appear to get a lot for your money but value and performance, and better brand protection, will come from dealing with premium publishers investing in quality content.