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.

A hybrid model is a big step forward for the “Gold Standard” of audience measurement tools, but it still doesn’t address the new challenges faced by media planners. As the “People, not Pages” approach gains greater acceptance, media planners will be less focused on choosing one media property over another. Instead of choosing between Maxim.com and AskMen.com, planners will choose between two ad networks offering the same segment targeting men 18-25 with an interest in fashion. But what is the reach and composition for each of the two ad networks offering that same segment? Right now, there is no independent 3rd party audience verification tool for targeted media. This is fine for direct response marketers, where targeting is simply a means to a very measurable end: online response rates. But for brand marketers who define success as reach and frequency against a key demographic, independent audience verification is key. Focusing on “People, Not Pages” allows marketers to be much more accurate and efficient, but marketers need assurance that they are getting what they pay for.

How do you see this issue being resolved? Through survey companies like Vizu and InsightExpress? Measurement companies like comScore? Pure-play data vendors like BlueKai? Data/media vendors like Aperture? I’m curious to hear your thoughts.