Forget viewability; transparency is the real issue

A viewablity standard does little to improve the odds of a client’s ad actually being seen, and it does even less to effectively tackle the more serious problems of fraud and campaign inefficiency, says Marco Ricci, CEO of Adloox.

It’s great that the online ad business is looking to tackle the problem of viewability. Barely more than half of all ads sold are ‘viewable’. And this situation is ridiculous; it’s like buying a cup of coffee to be told I can only drink half of it.

And while it’s great news that Media Research Council, the standards body, recently lifted its self-imposed block on viewable impressions as a metric (at least the industry now has a technical benchmark), the bar has been set too low; the opportunity to see an ad for one second when attention is probably elsewhere doesn’t make an ad ‘viewable and efficient’ in my book.

A viewablity standard does little to improve the odds of a client’s ad actually being seen, and it does even less to effectively tackle the wider, more serious problems of fraud and campaign inefficiency. This is the real challenge we face – so why is there relatively little attention on it?

These are growing problems too. With more money pouring into digital from offline, ad tech is a high-growth, disruptive and profitable sector. This attracts investors and drives innovation. This also attracts bad actors, stealing volume and claiming audience. Programmatic media, the most disruptive force in digital media, is at a tipping point and I hope will bring this issue of efficiency and transparency into sharper focus.

As more publishers make inventory available, advertisers shift more budget into it, and platforms get better at integrating data and improving performance – we move farther from programmatic’s origin as a home for second-rate inventory and closer to the targeted, efficient future of advertising we know it can be.

Eye-watering projections put the value of the programmatic sector between $17 billion (IDC) and $32 billion (MagnaGlobal) by 2017 – but even then that’s just 30% of display – itself a relatively small slice of a media pie still dominated by broadcast media.

But the pace of change is not as fast as it could be, and it is not a case of technology holding the sector back, but vested interests in avoiding transparency.

It’s easy to see why there’s a lack of transparency on the supply side. The more technology makes it possible to reach a specific person, rather than relying on context-based advertising or direct display, the easier it becomes for advertisers to bypass direct spend on premium inventory and reach that audience elsewhere.

This opens up competition from rivals and erodes CPMs. That’s why many publishers don’t want to be open about the impressions that they do make available for programmatic. Thing is, deals are done at a publisher level. That’s as far as the transparency goes. So if one campaign doesn’t perform particularly well, you put it down to bad luck, poor creative, not very well optimised… whatever.

But go a level deeper and a different picture emerges. At Adloox we have found huge variations in inventory quality within respected publishers at domain (url referrer) level. Click farms, inappropriate ad placement, Malware viruses, bots and iframes – you name it – all within websites from whom you’d expect better. From publisher websites that claim to only serve to premium ‘Whitelists’.

It’s possible that some of these publishers are unaware of the existence of iframes – which layer multiple ads on top of each other – and click farms, that fake conversions to trigger payments. It’s possible that some of them turn a blind eye, knowing full well that poor performing inventory will, more often than not, slip through the net. I’d rather believe that, than believe so-called ‘quality’ publishers are in on the act.

So assuming that publishers are blissfully unaware, the onus is on the demand side – and specifically verification companies like us – to monitor for fraud and weed it out.

But with all the focus on viewability we miss two very big things: the fact that a staggering number of those views are views by robots (as opposed to actual people) and the inefficiency of inappropriate placement.

And as ISBA’s Bob Wootton has consistently said, when an advertising business as large as Facebook decides that it’s OK to show beheading videos, the onus is on the brand to make sure their ad isn’t being run against it. In that particular case I think Nissan and Nationwide would have preferred it if their ads remained unviewable.

It’s an unholy trinity of low viewability, inappropriate placement and outright fraud that drives inefficiency in advertising – and here’s the rub – as ad tech consolidates around a few middlemen with clients on both the demand and supply side, how is anyone incentivised to tackle the root of the problem?

Initiatives like 3MS will, I hope, build on the viewability benchmark and look at efficiency in the round. We’re focused on demystifying this area for our clients, so they understand the issues more widely. Viewability metrics aside, agencies need greater transparency and deeper insight.

So what next? At the moment, this isn’t on the radar for many media buyers because it’s small beer for most big brands. When programmatic is 30% of display, itself a small percentage of ad spend, itself a small part of a wider multimedia and multiplatform marketing campaign – of which there are many – 35% inefficiency is little more than a rounding error.

But in aggregate that’s tens of millions of dollars of ad spend wasted on keeping the bad actors in business, rising to $1.2 billion by 2017 on the IDC’s projections in the US and Europe alone. Perhaps market forces will drive out the bad actors if brands start paying more attention.