2010: The Year of Ad Visibility

December 14th, 2009 Comments

Advertisers bidding on media inventory now have a wealth of information on individual ad impressions and the audience behind them.
Much of this data has only become available recently and there is going to be a tremendous amount of learning in 2010 about what data is most important.

One new kind of data is ad visibility, which reflects how long an ad was visible to a user, if at all. Online advertisers currently pay for ads that are placed on portions of the page the user never sees, often because the user doesn’t scroll all the way down the page. Mpire, a company working on ad visibility, reports that as many as 40% of all display ads are never seen by consumers. That’s a whole lot of ads and a whole lot of advertising dollars wasted.

Digital marketers have been aware of the ad visibility issue but I think 2010 is the year where we’ll see it enter the mainstream conversation. Here’s why:

In an environment that is increasingly driven by quantitative analysis of performance, ad visibility is the single data point that is most predictive of performance. You don’t need to perform any statistical analysis to understand that an unseen ad is totally worthless. Imperfect reporting in major adserving platforms like DART and Atlas currently allows an unseen ad to receive credit for driving a purchase. But it is only a matter of time before these systems advance and unseen ads are recognized for what they really are — a big drag on campaign performance.

More and more ad technology companies are offering on ad visibility. Tracking ad visibility requires additional javascript code, but more and more companies are beginning to report on the metric. Here are a few of the companies who have started offering ad visibility in the last year.

  • Lotame’s Time Spent technology
  • RealVu, a dedicated ad visibility reporting platform
  • Adometry, a custom reporting platform which includes
  • Eyewonder’s Ad Visibility reporting suite
  • MPire’s adXpose reporting product
  • Eyeblaster’s Dwell Time reporting [authors note: added 12/16/09]

Ad visibility is well positioned from a market perspective to achieve widespread adoption. Big advertisers have a lot to gain through ad visibility reporting. By measuring the most basic performance driver for their advertising, advertisers can better manage their media buying. In the future, advertisers might insist that they only pay for ad impressions that are actually seen by consumers. Big publishers also would stand to gain if ad visibility becomes a key metric. Since ads are more highly visible on professionally produced content pages where users spend more time, ad visibility would allow premium publishers to claw back ad dollars from the long tail. David Cohen of Universal McCann points out that MSNBC has already formed a partnership with RealVu, a company that provides ad visibility reporting. Many of the recent advances in display advertising practices, and the resulting shifts in revenue, have benefiting advertisers and the long-tail, at the expense of major publishers. Ad visibility is unique because it aligns the interests of advertisers and publishers.

The importance of ad visibility is common sense. And based on my view of the market, I think it will be recognized as such in 2010.

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  • In your list of visibility providers, you should mention Alenty.
    We measure the visibility of billions of ads in Europe.
    Advertisers control the quality of the ads they buy.
    Publishers use our system to increase their CPM by selling guaranteed visibility durations.
  • Great conversation occurring.
  • johnhaake
    Hey Greg,

    Great post, but you need to consider adding Eyeblaster to your visibility list. We have a number of features and metrics that help agencies and brands assess their ads' viability. Our campaign management platform, MediaMind, has a feature called AdSnap which takes 5 screen shots of live ads on the publisher's site and automatically creates a PowerPoint to pass on to customers. Eyeblaster also has a Below the Fold metric which measures page location of served ads. And our Dwell Time metric, which accurately captures the full spectrum of user engagement, has already become an industry standard. http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007241

    Also, please check out my list of things to consider in 2010>>> http://www.johnhaake.com/wordpress/?p=139

    Thanks,

    John Haake
    @dotjohn
  • Thanks for the comment John, I've included Eyeblaster in the list above. I welcome any other companies that report on ad visibility to chime in.
  • Sabotosh
    I'm not sure why digital brand advertisers haven't followed suit with tv advertisers.

    With guaranteed buying I can see this working; but I don't think guaranteed buying is where the invalid IMPR's are originating.

    The problem with respect to non-guaranteed display advertising is the distance between the advertiser and publisher.

    All these Ad Visibility services sound great - now how do we make them work when the ad impression goes through 3 ad servers, an an exchange, is served inside an iframe - and the resulting referring URL where the ad ran is ad.yieldmanager.com or doubleclick.net?

    Unless all the Adnets, Exchanges, Optimizers, Advertisers, Publishers, and DSP's work together to support ad visibility - technology alone cannot easily solve the problem.
  • The best scenario, and the most difficult to implement, would be to have some sort ad visibility data at ad call. But I think the first step is for buyers to start measuring ad visibility and viewing aggregated reports after the media has run. A buyer can't action impression level data without advanced automation, but buyers could still benefit from channel level, site level, or section level indices for ad visibility which they could review manually.

    I agree that most of the invalid impressions -- to clarify, I see ad visibility as distinct from the issue of fradulent impressions and I'm discussing ad visibility -- comes from non-guaranteed, there is a huge difference in ad visibility even among guaranteed buys. Guaranteed network buy still represent a lot of spend, of course.

    The distance between publisher and buyer is great but there will be less intermediaries in the future. I do acknowledge the iFrame problem though, that seems like one of the greatest hurdles.
  • kirbywinfield
    Great post Greg, thanks for the shout out. On the iframe topic, AdXpose has actually had pretty consistent success seeing transparency down to the site level below the doubleclicks and atlases of the world. It isn't ad server iframes that cause issues as much as it's certain networks purposely obfuscating referrer data. We tell our clients, when you see obfuscation, you want to pay close attention to the metrics occurring below that obfuscated channel - we can still tell you in-view and engagement data that should guide a decision as to whether an obfuscated channel is worth continued support in your plan.
  • Great point Kirby. Most media planner define quality inventory the way the Supreme Court defined obscenity -- "I know it when I see it." This approach to media buying fails when networks or publishers selling into exchanges obfuscate referrer URL. Ad visibility is a way to quantify the "quality" of inventory in the absence of a transparent site list.
  • djdan85
    Never even thought of this issue, but makes complete sense.

    In some ways, parallels the TV advertising space recently - advertisers dont want to pay for "viewers" that aren't watching the tube.
  • Totally --- once TiVo started to create a difference between impressions and views in television, Nielsen released DVR-adjusted ratings.

    I'm not sure why digital brand advertisers haven't followed suit with tv advertisers. If there are any readers with relevant expertise, please let me know if I'm missing something major around the technical complexity of the ad visibility.
  • Why do you think that it'll become to the forefront in 2010?

    I'd love to see buying products include ad visibility as a variable in understanding when/where/how to buy in real-time.
  • I think agency technology competency has been a barrier to adoption for ad visibility. In 2010 a lot of dollars are going to start flowing through buy side agents that understand ad serving from a strategic perspective.

    I'm not counting on DART or Atlas to integrate ad visibility into their advertiser ad serving products until there is already wide adoption, so individual companies are going to have to put in effort. In the past, ad operations was seen as a cost center at agencies instead of a performance driver. Now that ad operations, that is to say data, is viewed as a performance driver, an agency exec can build a compelling business case for spending more time and energy there.

    Ad networks have viewed ad technology as a performance driver for their key business goals all along. As a result, they often outmatch their partners in technology competency and have driven a lot of the industry innovation. Agencies are now pursuing technologies that support their own business interests, such as ad visibility. Agencies have put already put their hand on the tiller of ad tech innovation and -- if you'll forgive the metaphor -- I think the ship will actually begin changing course in 2010.
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