Tags containing: "viewability"

To mock or not to mock? Avoiding fraudulent advertising campaign verification

August 24, 2016 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

To mock or not to mock? That is the question frequently asked by media publishers trying to meet advertiser demands related to digital campaign success. The industry’s intense focus on viewability and transparency issues associated with ad fraud hijacks the limelight from another vital area of interest for advertisers: Are campaigns actually running as contracted?

What the advertiser wants, the advertiser gets
To justify the millions (and millions!) of dollars spent promoting products, advertisers rightfully demand proof that their campaigns execute as promised. From expected ad rendering on the page to accurate targeting by geography and behavior profiles, advertisers want to know that the right ad has been served in the right way in the right location on the right page to the right demographic. In fact, when considering the average spend of a large-scale national campaign flight, many advertisers will assert they deserve to know their campaign is performing as promised.

Authenticated ad inventory yields benefits
The advertising ecosystem is a dynamic environment processing millions of ads covering billions in spend at any one time. Considering that 5% of display and mobile ads are served incorrectly at launch and countless more break during flight, publishers need to actively monitor and protect their ad-generated revenue channels.[i]

Authenticated ad inventory helps publishers secure ad revenue by avoiding pre-planned delivery overages to compensate for anticipated discrepancies. In addition, it also reduces the frequency of misfiring campaigns, thus minimizing instances of “make good” campaigns.

Ad verification is more than good looks
Reputable publishers recognize the value of their high-quality inventory and demonstrate it by providing proof of ad delivery according to established terms. This is a complicated prospect in an age of large-scale campaigns incorporating ads of varying formats (i.e., HTML5, pre/mid/post-roll video, native, etc.) through multiple platforms (i.e., display, tablet, smartphone, gaming consoles, etc.) across increasingly granular targeting segments.

A Photoshopped mock-up or full-page capture of the ad on a screen is a start, but it isn’t enough. Presenting a “mock-up” of how an ad should look could be considered fraudulent as it’s not a true representation of how an ad performs across all formats, devices and geographies. In fact, several industries (Tier 2 automotive, pharmaceutical, etc.) and countries (especially those in Latin America) regulate advertising-based billing processes and require third-party verified screenshots upon invoice presentation.

Beyond the visual of “how” an ad looks on a device, publishers must prove that each ad is delivered as contracted with the advertiser. Continuous monitoring of campaigns at launch and throughout flight will quickly detect errors associated with targeting, creative and device-specific issues that impede optimal campaign execution.

Authentication of possibly hundreds of ad combinations—by size, format, device and geography—is used by publishers to substantiate inventory value and by advertisers to audit and measure campaign ROI.

Consider this
To verify accurate ad placement, execution and targeting, a publisher must consider these five factors:

Legitimacy: Screenshots of ads in a live environment truthfully demonstrate that an ad is delivered to the right target. A “mock-up” or “test page” may display how an ad appears on a site, but in reality it provides a false sense of security for how the ad is actually executing. It also infers that the ad will render the same across all devices, OS, formats and geographies.

Accuracy: Mock-ups can’t prove ad placement as many ad units only occur behind paywalls or require an IP address in order to serve the correct messaging to the individual user.

Automation: Imagine scaling the manual process of verifying ads across the overwhelming number of devices, browsers, user profiles, formats, sizes and geo-locations. Without automation, the task is almost impossible. Leverage technology to streamline the process.

Costs: Carefully consider the total cost of ownership when deciding between an in-house or outsourced process. While in-house resources are easier to control, it is difficult to secure funding and keep the staff engaged. On the flip side, outsourcing requires integration, training, probable coordination with targeting vendors, and continuous oversight which could ultimately be more costly than anticipated—not to mention the complications of managing a remote team, in a case of choosing a non-local entity if a non-native entity is selected.

Quality Assurance: Reliance on mock-up designs to certify campaign execution will no catch errors that occur at launch or throughout the campaign flight.

Ad verification is a complex, yet critical endeavor for publishers looking to highlight inventory value. Don’t mock it.

Chris Olson founded The Media Trust (@themediatrust) with Dave Crane in 2005. He currently serves as CEO, where he drives the company’s vision, direction and growth plans. Prior to establishing The Media Trust Company, he spent four years as the chief operating officer and board member at Spheric Media. From 1998 until 2000, he was the vice president, global equities at Commerzbank; and from 1993 until 1998, he was the vice president of electronic trading at Salomon Brothers, Inc.

[i] The Media Trust analysis of millions of ad campaigns verified over the course of 10 years

Advertising | Industry-Research

Marketers increasingly favor viewability and third-party verification

August 2, 2016 Research Team

The majority of advertisers chose viewabilty as their campaign objective, followed by click thru rate and view thru rate according to a study by data software company Videology. Of all campaigns that ran on the Videology platform in Q2 2016, 43% used viewable rate as an objective KPI. Of those campaigns, 89% chose to measure viewability using the MRC standard (50% of pixels on screen for at least two consecutive seconds) while the additional 11% chose to use their own custom standard for determining if an ad was viewable.

Advertisers continue to emphasize demographic, geographical and behavioral data to target their campaigns. Over half of all campaigns Videology analyzed used behavioral targeting, while TV Viewing accounted for 14%, with advertisers looking to add incremental reach to their TV buys. It is interesting to note that more marketers are emphasizing the need for in-demo delivery of campaigns, a metric originating from the traditional methods of non-programmatic TV buying; Videology has seen a 115% year-over-year increase in the number of campaigns using Nielsen or comScore to measure in-demo targeting success.

Cross-screen advertising saw a 20% year-over-year increase (compared to Q2 2015), with the bulk of the activity consisting of combined PC, mobile, and connected TV placements. Campaigns using PC alone made up just 12%, a fraction of where this was one year ago when they made up a quarter of all placements.

Advertising | Industry-Research | Perspectives

CMOs: Do You Know Where Your Ads Are? New research proves why it matters.

July 14, 2016 DCN

Editor's note: The comScore study “The Halo Effect: How Advertising on Premium Publishers Drives Higher Ad Effectiveness” was not commissioned by Digital Content Next (DCN) or any of its member companies. While the results were shared with DCN prior to publication, DCN did not have any influence over the design of the research or its findings.

Programmatic advertising and its aggregation of inventory are often viewed as the key forces behind the commoditization of digital ad impressions. The shift to audience-centric media buying from earlier practices emphasizing context has left many questioning whether or not the environment surrounding advertising really matters. It is important that we examine what extent does quality drives advertising effectiveness.

Today’s release of comScore’s independent research, “The Halo Effect: How Advertising on Premium Publishers Drives Higher Ad Effectiveness” presents empirical findings that Digital Content Next member sites delivered significantly higher branding effectiveness results than other sites.* Importantly, the research finds that the primary driving force for the brand lift is the positive impact of the “halo effect” of the contextual environment in which an ad is seen. In other words: A good environment drives better ad campaign effectiveness. In fact, while some of the positive effect can be contributed to higher ad viewability and less invalid traffic on premium sites, comScore found that the most significant driver of increased effectiveness is the halo effect of appearing on premium sites. This “premium” designation is one that our own research has borne out as a distinguishing factor in other areas, such as the quality of ad inventory and the significantly lower bot traffic on DCN member sites.

What value does the halo factor have for marketers? Used properly, it can help a brand cut through the clutter and save money on marketing by using this momentum to operate effectively and efficiently throughout the marketing funnel, particularly in the brand consideration stage where the “halo” lift was 3x.

This is demonstrated by the research, which first compared the overall brand lift effectiveness of ads delivered on DCN members’ sites versus non-DCN premium publishers sites. DCN premium publisher sites significantly outperformed those on non-DCN sites—by 67% (0.89 brand lift vs. 0.53). Measuring brand lift answers some of the biggest questions marketers have such as are my ads influencing consumer behavior, are they influencing sales and to what degree. Knowing a campaign is 67% more effective in influencing consumer behavior and intent to purchase is a win-win situation giving marketers a lead in the marketplace.

comScore also identified ad effectiveness metrics in other parts of the marketing funnel. DCN publisher sites performed 32% better on top funnel metrics, which includes awareness, recall and message association (.56 brand lift vs. .42). The mid-funnel—where consumers have the potential to develop a stronger interest in your brand—performed more than three times as effective for DCN publisher sites with a 1.87 brand lift vs. 0.51. Premium publisher sites can influence the mid-funnel by 255% more effectiveness, a potential accelerator of brand sales. The lower and final part of the funnel includes purchase intent and share of consumer choice metrics. DCN premium publishers performed 9% better on the bottom-funnel metrics (.38 brand lift vs. .35).

We know that the quality of ad inventory and the substantially lower bot traffic on DCN member sites is a positive driving force but the comScore research determined how much of a factor this is in driving higher ad effectiveness. To arrive at the pure value of the “halo effect,” comScore factored these elements out of the equation deriving that DCN publisher sites drive a “halo effect” of 51% higher ad effectiveness.

comScore’s independent research provides a clear message that brands benefit from advertising on premium publisher sites. While the research found that premium publishers perform better across all phases of the marketing funnel, the value in driving mid-funnel metrics is especially important to convert awareness into positive brand consideration. So, while digital continues to create opportunities for targeting and increase opportunities for efficiencies, it is clear that placement within the context of quality environments provides a “halo effect” that drives ad effectiveness.

*This study was not commissioned by Digital Content Next (DCN) or any of its member companies. While the results were shared with DCN prior to publication, DCN did not have any influence over the design of the research or its findings.

Perspectives

It’s time to start thinking about inventory quality data as an asset, rather than a liability

December 14, 2015 DCN

For years, viewability and ad fraud have created fear that incorporating them into the workflow would diminish inventory value and make certain impressions impossible to sell. While many have begrudgingly accepted that media quality monitoring has become table stakes for doing business with most reputable advertisers, few are using their data to its fullest potential.

After all, in virtually every other industry, inventory quality is a valuable tool for attracting customers, setting prices, and maximizing revenues. Imagine going to the jewelry store and being told that there was not only one price for every ring in the display case, but that you had just as much chance of buying a rhinestone as a diamond. Instead of the haphazard distribution model of our maturing online ecosystem, retailers optimize their yields by charging a premium for rarer diamonds and generating additional sales from people willing to accept a rhinestone at a lower price.

There’s no reason publishers can’t use similar tactics to improve the yield of their inventory using the information they have about viewability, ad fraud, and brand safety. With that in mind, here are four steps you can take to put your media quality data to work and grow your business.

1. Understand your inventory performance.

Knowledge is power, and the more you know about your inventory, the better off you’ll be when it comes to improving its quality and setting prices for your customers.

The best way to get the lay of the land is take a good, hard look at the data and start figuring out how different types of inventory perform at a granular level. For instance, you might find that ads on your women’s lifestyle content are most likely to be in view, or that an automotive section of your site has high fraud.

Instead of shrinking away from media quality data, use this analysis to tout your highest-performing impressions to prospective buyers and charge a premium to those who are interested in purchasing them.

2. Optimize your site design for high-quality media.

Once you have an idea of which parts of your inventory are performing best on your site, you can start working to increase the number of high-quality impressions you have to sell.

In our recent Q3 media quality report, we found that skyscrapers and half-page ads are the most likely to be viewable, so it might make sense to redesign your site in a way that allows you to run more of them. But that really depends on what you find when you dg into your inventory performance. Run A/B tests, experiment, test, and measure.

Of course, you’ll also want to keep a close eye on how different ad combinations affect your user experience. The easiest way to guarantee viewability is make all of your ads sticky and follow your users as they scroll. But great viewability won’t do much to help your bottom line if you’ve created a page where the ads are so intrusive that people stop coming to your site.

3. Sort your impressions into buckets based on media quality.

After maximizing the amount of viewable, fraud-free, and brand-safe inventory you have at your disposal, it’s time to start establishing price tiers based on quality. We recommend sorting all of your impressions into three buckets, one each for high-quality, medium-quality, and low-quality inventory.

While everyone will initially want to buy from your top bucket, supply and demand will kick in: You’ll be able to charge prices high enough that some buyers are willing to settle for medium- or low-quality impressions. Indeed, retailers across the country will make plenty of money selling inexpensive and moderately priced inventory of all kinds this holiday season, and publishers should do the same.

4. Use your information to automate your transaction and trafficking processes.

If you’re really advanced, you can use your inventory quality data to forecast how many viewable impressions you’ll have available at any given time. This will allow you to automate your prices based on your expected scarcity, as well as to make sure you don’t over-buffer campaigns by giving away too many impressions in order to meet a viewability quota. An accurate forecast also gives you the confidence you need to make guarantees to customers based on viewability, fraud, or brand safety.

As technology develops, we expect that publishers will ultimately be able to traffic campaigns toward their highest or lowest viewability inventory directly on the ad server. Those that take steps today to establish best practices for leveraging these kinds of data will enjoy huge advantages over their less advanced rivals as buyers continue to demand better and better digital advertising experiences for their clients.

Indeed, if we’ve learned one thing watching the rise of viewability these past few years, it’s that media quality metrics are here to stay. Now, it’s up to you to make the most of them.

Dave Marquard is currently Director of Product Management, Publisher Solutions at Integral Ad Science. For the past 15 years he has held leadership roles in product management, engineering, and marketing at internet technology and enterprise software firms such as Google, IBM, and Lombardi Software.

Perspectives

Can we please leave viewability out of content marketing?

October 27, 2015 DCN

Content marketing has captured the marketing world by storm in the past couple of years. Marketers finally have a toolset to tell stories and build brands online rather than only harvesting consumer intent as before. Indeed, eight out of ten marketers are already marketing with content.

Like many new marketing disciplines, including social marketing during its infancy, content marketing still lacks standardization, especially when it comes to measurement. Marketers have been struggling to identify ways to effectively track and measure content marketing. Content Marketing Institute research shows that the primary content marketing metric is traffic to the brand’s content, i.e. how many people discover my content.

Most marketers also take into consideration standard web metrics such as time on page, articles consumed during the visit, video completions, social shares, etc. Advanced content marketers are going the extra mile and tracking “high-value actions” – events that indicate that their audiences are more valuable. For example, an auto maker might define someone going from its content to the dealer locater page as a high-value action. At the end of the day it’s all about engagement.

In the past year though a new metric started emerging: viewability. Viewability is an essential metric in a digital marketing world increasingly going programmatic, where marketers are able to get less expensive inventory but of sometimes questionable quality.

Unfortunately, viewability holds little relevance for content marketing. Let me explain why.

The content marketing metrics we’ve discussed above all have one thing in common—they all track engagement with the content itself, a big shift away from the display world, where the ad impression holds a lot of value. The value for marketers in display advertising comes from consumers being exposed to ads on publisher sites. The value in content marketing is completely different and comes from the consumer reading the article or watching the video, not from glancing at a unit promoting it.

This value is much more similar to search advertising, where marketers don’t care if their Google ads are viewed; they only care if they were clicked and led to the desired action. And there’s a reason no one requires Google to provide viewability tracking on Adwords: It just doesn’t mean much. It’s all about consumer engagement after he or she raises their hand and clicks.

The other digital marketing behemoth, Facebook, just announced it’ll start offering viewability tracking, which stems from Facebook’s CPM model. When marketers pay CPMs they essentially pay for impression value (or the value of a 1000 impressions), and therefore, viewability of these impressions is essential and needs to be tracked. For Facebook’s CPC offering, viewability doesn’t matter as much as engagement, though.

In general, the whole content marketing industry is moving towards engagement-oriented pricing models: cost-per-click, cost-per-view, cost-per-engagement, cost-per-acquisition, etc. For publishers, it can be a worrisome scenario as so much of their inventory is tied to CPM pricing. But if they believe content marketing and native advertising can help revive dwindling ad revenues, they will have to adjust their pricing models to engagement-oriented ones. Marketers, for their part, should distinguish between scenarios where viewability matters—like programmatic-based display advertising—and when it doesn’t, like search marketing and content marketing.

One of the major drivers of the viewability trend has been marketers’ justified concerns about fraudulent impressions in the growing programmatic eco-system. While viewability is great at providing reassurance for display advertising, there are better ways to assure fraud-free content marketing. In content marketing, fraud tends to manifest itself in non-human traffic (bots) that usually generates low engagement and can effectively be monitored with ad verification companies that guarantee actual human beings consume your content.

After 20 years of annoying consumers with ineffective banner ads, content marketing lends marketers the opportunity they’ve been longing for: a means of telling brand stories that fosters delight and conversation with consumers, rather than indifference or outright annoyance. It would be a shame to mar content marketing’s momentum with irrelevant display-age metrics. Let’s focus on delighting consumers with great content and measuring the ensuing engagement instead.

Senior Director of Product Marketing, Asaf Hochman (@asafhoch) focuses on Outbrain Amplify and works with brands and agencies to do better marketing. Previously, Asaf was a digital strategist at ad agencies Grey, TBWA, and Publicis, and also spent time on the client-side at Red Bull and General Mills.

Perspectives

Fake traffic, bots and a chance for publishers to stand out

October 1, 2015 Mark Glaser, Founder and Publisher – MediaShift

It’s one of the Internet’s biggest open secrets, and, thanks to a new expose by Bloomberg Business, it’s finally getting its much-deserved 15 minutes of fame: The online advertising industry, keen to consistently reach more and more eyeballs, is actually serving a big chunk of ads to bots and other non-human traffic. Around one-third, or 36%, of all web traffic is fake, according to a report last year by the Internet Advertising Bureau.

Another study by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) last year found that 11% of display ads and about a quarter of video ads were never viewed by humans. The study estimates advertisers will lose about $6.3 billion on fake traffic in 2015.

But there is a critical difference regarding which publishers are affected most. New research from Digital Context Next shows that premium publishers such as Conde Nast, ESPN, Vox Media, CBS Interactive, NBCUniversal and the New York Times had about 2.8% of its display ads and 2.5% of its video ads going to “sophisticated bots” — much lower than the rates ANA found in its study.

“[DCN] members must continue to be diligent as fraud is an evolving problem and trust is earned each and every day,” DCN honcho Jason Kint said in the report. The report also outlined ways that publishers can avoid bots and non-human traffic: vetting third-party traffic sources; not relying on viewability as the sole measure of impressions; and limiting or eliminating retargeting of visitors.

Shady Techniques
But not all publishers aim for that kind of experience. “Sometimes traffic brokers use shady techniques like pop-up windows to trick users into opening a page,” Vox’s Timothy Lee explains. “In other cases, the traffic is purely automated.” In other words, computers are essentially being hijacked by viruses and programmed to visit sites.

Despite fledgling efforts to move ad measurement metrics to time spent, such as those by the Financial Times, it seems like the entire Internet ecosystem is chasing after clicks — which is what fuels so much fake traffic — the ability to be “bot-free” is emerging as a new kind of premium. Fraud rates and bot “eyes” are much lower when publishers are willing to pay more for high-quality marketing, so it puts an added pressure on them to invest in themselves. Publishers often know what kind of territory they’re getting into if they choose to pay less for traffic, according to a former publishing executive who knowingly bought false ad impressions.

“They would let me decide how much I was willing to pay for traffic, and when I told them $0.002 or below, they made it clear they had little control over the quality of traffic they would send at that price,” he told Digiday. “Quality didn’t really matter to us, though.”

Programmatic Problem?
The emphasis on quantity versus quality advertising is the double edge to this sword. Programmatic advertising, which many in the digital advertising industry are shuffling toward because automated advertising increases scale, also opens up the door to fraudulent advertising because publishers are less able to personally vouch for the advertising networks they’re working with. Fraud rates are lower when an actual personal relationship between the publisher and the advertiser exists.

Yet veering away from programmatic advertising is not quite realistic given current industry trends. According to eMarketer, programmatic advertising currently comprises about 25% of the approximately $58.6 billion digital advertising industry. Some experts estimate 80% of all ads will be automated within the next decade.

So what’s there to do? Antifraud teams at companies like Google, for example, are refusing to pay any publishers caught serving fake ad impressions — and won’t charge advertisers anything — in an effort to turn robotic traffic into an unprofitable business. And that’s key, because right now every party involved in this scam, whether knowingly or unknowingly, participates because it earns them money in some way.

And perhaps this is all good news for premium publishers, giving them a way to differentiate themselves by showing they have solid, real audiences who will appreciate top-notch content and acceptable advertising.

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue

Viewability problems spread to video ads on social

September 17, 2015 Mark Glaser, Founder and Publisher – MediaShift

A funny thing happened on the way to social distribution domination. While publishers have started to test more and more original content on social platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat, those platforms are still suffering from problems of viewability for ads—especially with video.

Let’s look at the statistics: The Media Rating Council and the Interactive Advertising Bureau suggests a video ad is viewable when at least half of the ad’s pixels are visible on a screen for at least two consecutive seconds. An April study by Google found the average viewability of video ads across the web (not taking YouTube into account) was 54%. When considering video ads on YouTube, that figure jumped to 91% across different devices and apps — and video ads were significantly more viewable on mobile and tablet as opposed to desktop. Non-viewable ads, meanwhile, were either scrolled off the screen or abandoned in less than two seconds.

Short Attention Span on Snapchat
Yet just because ads might be more viewable on mobile than on desktop doesn’t discount the anxiety surrounding their worth. A recent article on Digiday found a full 70% of Snapchat’s mostly millennial audience had moved on from an ad after only three seconds. Given Snapchat currently charges brands for video ads that are viewed for even less than a second, it’s not only raised discussion on the definition on viewability, but also the relative value of these ads for brands.

“Snapchat is using this measurement that just seems off from what brands and clients want and where the rest of the industry is going,” a digital marketing insider with knowledge of Snapchat’s ad model told Garrett Sloane of Digiday. “If an ad is on the screen for less than a second, it’s hard to imagine it made an impression.”

Despite the ongoing debate on the impact of technology giants becoming the gatekeepers for brands and publishers, the platforms will have to work more closely with these parties if they are all going to have long-term, stable ad revenues. Twitter, for example, offers six-second pre-roll ads. Facebook also “teaches brands how to capture attention within three seconds, using muted auto-play videos, which people can scroll right past,” Sloane wrote in Digiday.

Third-Party Verification?
Some companies are demanding third-party tools be used to evaluate which advertisements are actually being seen, to help ensure the accuracy of the information and maintain higher viewability. Complaints from Uniliver and Kelloggs are suspected to be behind YouTube’s announcement to use third-party tools instead of its own in-house measuring tool, Active View.

But this also has its negative consequences. Facebook, for instance, has argued that “third-party verification view tags often slow down consumer experience and don’t always report views consistently,” and has hinted that these third-party verification tools could compromise valuable user data. And Facebook — whose log-in can track which desktop or mobile devices people use — has access to the consumer data that is so crucial to advertisers. That data is difficult for most publishers to obtain otherwise, and generally harder to determine on mobile, because the varying size of different gadgets require different kinds of advertising.

Maintaining a quality user experience versus earning revenue from advertising seems to be the trade-off that’s happening on social platforms. Snapchat, for instance, maintains brands won’t be charged if viewers skip an ad entirely. But it also offers its users the chance to skip any advertisement they wish.

These are early days for video ads on social platforms, so there could be more standards among the major players in the near future. That could go a long way toward addressing viewability issues. Snapchat videos, for instance, take up the entire screen (so eyes can’t wander), and also use the vertical video format which leads to higher view rates.

Or publishers and brands could also try another route to better viewability: better ads, and even native ads that are creative enough for people to play through and share without skipping in disgust.

Advertising | Industry-Research

Viewability Continues to Trouble the Marketplace

August 18, 2015 DCN

Display ads were 11% less viewable in a year-over-year comparison reports Integral Ad Science in their Q2 2015 Media Quality Report. The viewability measure for display dropped from 49.4% in 2Q 2014 to 44% in Q2 2015. In fact, publisher sites decreased their viewability rate from 55.5% to 50.1% as did ad networks and exchanges from 45% to 39.9%.

During the same quarter fraud decreased to 14.1% from 16.5% in Q1 2015. Publishers fared better with fraudulent impressions at 3.7% where ad networks and exchanges had close to 4 times more fraudulent traffic at 14.1%. Overall video ads perform better than display in both viewability (37.2%) and fraud rates (11.6%) in Q2 2105. While the industry has made improvements in non-human fraudulent traffic, it’s slow to improve in viewability.

Integral also offers the “TRue Advertising Quality (TRAQ)” score using a mix of metrics including fraud, viewability, ad clutter, brand safety and professionalism. Display averaged a score of 604 on a scale of 1,000 with publishers scoring a 656 and ad networks and exchanges scoring a 584.

Perspectives

5 Ways Industry Leaders Need To Step Up

June 11, 2015 Jason Kint, CEO – DCN

For those that have been watching the move to digital for decades, it’s often hard to appreciate how much transformation is still going on. We’re literally writing history and building the future of digital media every day. The value to consumers coming from the technology, automation and innovation does not cease to astound.

DCN continues to point out that the humans setting the rules also need to keep up with the pace of change. I’m not talking about the ones on Capitol Hill but rather the leaders and the decision-makers in the media and tech companies and their self-regulation bodies. We must show a higher set of ethics and concern for the industry and its future. I’ve been pleased to see that in the past year we’ve elevated the discussion: Thought-leaders as varied as Om Malik, Tim Berners-Lee, John Battelle, Fatemeh Khatibloo, Andrew Keen, Tony Haile and countless others have taken on the types of issues that will help pave the way for the content and services that consumers trust and love.

However, more must be done. I have not yet seen the market step up with real solutions to the problems. There are few companies, not to mention leaders, joining me in calling out the issues and pushing for meaningful change.

As the leader of a trade association, I hear I’m not supposed to rattle too many cages. But I see my role as one that guides a transformation in the economics so that that we can continue to fund the content that consumers love to view, share and interact with for the long term. This means calling out issues and uncomfortable discussions that, at times, involve our own members. Perhaps my role is to also change the nature of a trade association in an accelerated world (or maybe this is a fast exit to the early retirement door). Regardless, promising young content sites like Vox, Refinery29 and Quartz, as well as brands that have been around for decades, are creating high-quality, trusted experiences for consumers and advertisers—each in their own unique and innovative ways. I want these businesses to absolutely crush it and be around for a long time to come.

To get there, we need to see more leaders make bold statements like Tim Cook’s last week: “I’m speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information. They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be.”

Tim Cook’s call to arms should create opportunity, not fear. An op-ed in Al-Jazeera America said it best: “As an undisputed leader among Internet companies, Google could seize the opportunity to be not just used, but trusted. All it takes is a single, clear commitment not to use our data against us. By invoking established principles of agency and loyalty, Google could assure users that their interest comes first, and advertisers won’t use all that data at the expense of consumers. Anything less just looks like whitewash.”

We need more leaders to step up. Enough hand wringing and talking about the problems, let’s see some real change. Across each of the key issues we’ve surfaced this year, there have been countless opportunities for companies and leadership to step up and take bold action to make a difference. For now, I’ll just highlight the most egregious misses in my mind.

Fraud
Bombs have been dropping regarding the level of digital advertising being served to “bots” rather than humans. As with many issues, the industry has been slow to react. The first year was spent deciding whether to call them bots, invalid traffic, non-human traffic, or God-forbid: “fraud.” All the while, Bob Liodice, CEO of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), has dutifully led the charge calling out the fact this cancer is “funding criminal activity” and we need “a true call to action to stop this.” I completely agree.

Yet I was shocked last week by a fact discussed on an industry panel: An estimated 18% of “bot” traffic comes from data centers according to the seminal report on non-human traffic that was produced by the ANA and White Ops (page 26). As Michael Tiffany, CEO of White Ops, stated, “I think that successful botnets doing ad fraud today out of data center IP addresses is obscene.” That’s the right word for it.

For the less technical readers, there are very few instances in which human traffic would be coming from a data center such as AWS (Amazon Web Services). Independent researcher, Augustine Fou, breaks down the problem quite well. And Distil Networks also published a bot report (p. 6) last month that shows a number of hosting companies in the list of top sources of bot traffic.

Tiffany said it best when discussing how the industry can approach solutions: “Are we going to do the least to placate the audience while upsetting the status quo the least? Or are we going to take the steps that really direct those dollars in a big macro way which means changing some of today’s winners into losers and vice versa.”

Opportunity to Step Up: The dozens of ad networks and exchanges currently thriving in the programmatic space. The buyers and their trade groups should absolutely demand that all ad exchanges, ad servers, networks and 3rd party sellers of inventory block data center IP traffic to ads or, better still, those ad networks should simply step up and block data center IP traffic now.

Ad Blocking
We have already surpassed 200 million instances of ad blocking software installed. I’ve heard of DCN member sites with as low as 10% of their ads being blocked to as frighteningly high as 80%. As I wrote back in March, this is a massive issue. It’s not going away and it’s only going to get worse without real change. TechCrunch covered the issue in depth last week and, like us, connected the dots to privacy.

Opportunity to Step Up: Google. Yes, Google has the number one browser on the planet. They also have the most installations of ad blocking software. (Note: this could quickly change, and not for the better, with iOS announcing APIs for ad blockers on Monday.)

But according to the Financial Times, rather than initiating cross-industry discussion and action about the issue, Google instead chose to negotiate a deal in a dark room with Adblock Plus to whitelist their text ads across the entire web thereby ridding them of most of the problem. We’ve got to rebuild consumer trust in advertising so consumers won’t take steps to block all ads. Over the long term, that probably means less bottom of the barrel direct response retargeting ads and more brand campaigns that excite and engage with consumers.

Advertising Measurement
It’s no secret that much of the digital media industry is still finding its way through the wilderness as we move to the viewable currency. The current standard is clearly defined by the independent Media Ratings Council (MRC) is that a minimum of 50% of the pixels of an ad must be displayed for a minimum of one second. Any deviation from the standard causes confusion in the marketplace. Most premium publishers agree with their agency and advertising partners that a move to a viewable impression is a good thing. The process of getting there so that the additional value of a viewable impression is realized has been difficult. Calls for engagement beyond the minimum opportunity to see have been frustrating, but to me Facebook is much more worrisome.

Opportunity to step up: Facebook. Right now, Facebook lives in another world where a single pixel viewed for any amount of time counts as a viewable impression. As John Montgomery of GroupM also recently pointed out, Facebook also chooses to measure its own ads rather than allowing third-parties to verify like the rest of the media world. Facebook should join the rest of the industry in following the MRC standard and allowing third-parties to verify that they do. Interestingly, Facebook used protecting consumers’ privacy as their excuse for hiding from third party verification which brings me to…

Privacy
As I wrote in WSJ nearly a year ago, Facebook collects and uses your browsing history across the web through its seemingly innocuous Like button, which appears on most sites. While this is permitted, according to a page deep in their privacy policy, very few consumers know that this is happening. And the practice provides dubious value to the publisher or their consumers. In fact, Facebook’s Like button shouldn’t collect data until a consumer clicks on it. Period.

Opportunity to step up: Facebook. Needless to say I found myself shaking my head at a recent publisher event where sites were discussing how they could block Facebook from tracking their users. How on earth did this become a responsibility of the publisher to hack together a short-term solution?

Facebook could solve this in a matter of minutes. They already share code with most of the web to add the Like button to their sites. By simply adding a parameter to turn off “tracking”, any publisher could ask Facebook to not track its users across the web and apps. Facebook, do this:

Native Ads
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will likely release more guidance this year on native advertising. It’s unfortunate to me that the bar isn’t being raised across the industry ahead of their intervention. I still see way too many instances of “You may also like this” rather than a clear label of advertising. Last week, Mike Zaneis at the IAB once again called out that this wasn’t likely to be enough. However, most premium publishers are clearly labeling as Michael Sebastian wrote today on Ad Age.

Opportunity to step up: Facebook wins again. Ruthlessly weed out clearly deceptive advertising. It pained me to receive this ad the other day falsely labelled as content from ESPN that actually linked to this site. This goes beyond simple deception and is a clear violation of all sorts of intellectual property issues.

These are just a few of the issues where organizations have the opportunity to do more than form task forces that spend months merely discussing and defining rather than doing. Tim Cook has it right. We don’t want to be the kind of industry people can’t trust. Our businesses and brands are built on trusted relationships with consumers and advertisers. These relationships crumble without trust that the media will deliver what the consumer or advertise expects. We need some heavy hitters to get in the game and turn it around. The future of the industry depends on it.

Perspectives | Research

3 steps you can take now to make the digital ecosystem safer

May 18, 2015 Steve Guenther, Vice President, Digital Auditing—Alliance for Audited Media

We’ve all seen the headlines and statistics:

Advertisers will lose $6-10 billion to bots in 2015.

More than half of ad impressions are not seen.

A quarter of all video impressions are fraudulent.

Brands are not safe from bots and invalid traffic.

As an experienced digital auditor, the Alliance for Audited Media goes behind the scenes to examine the sources and systems of the underlying issues plaguing the digital advertising ecosystem. In a new white paper series, we delve into the issues of viewability, fraudulent and invalid traffic, and brand safety and transparency. All from a side you might not have read yet—the auditor’s perspective.

Based on our research, there are steps that all industry players – media buyers, vendors and publishers – can immediately take to make the digital ecosystem a safer place. Here are three takeaways that you can put to work today:

1. Prepare for 100 percent viewability
On the surface, viewability is a logical goal that seems readily attainable. Publishers should serve ads that can be seen by a human. Reality is far more complicated, of course. Different publishers work with different vendors. And different vendors—even those that are accredited—can use different measurement methodologies. Add in issues with browsers, screen sizes, ad delivery mechanisms and things quickly get very complicated. The industry is working toward solutions, but in the meantime, here’s what you can do now to prepare for 100 percent viewability:

Media Buyers: Know where your ads are going and where they ran: Work with reputable publishers and networks. Talk with vendors about measurement methodologies to better understand discrepancies. Demand audited systems and data to ensure you’re able to transact with trust and transparency.

Vendors: If you’re considering an MRC accreditation against the viewability standards, schedule a pre-audit engagement – now required by the MRC – with an independent third party to cost-effectively prepare your technology and processes for compliance with industry standards.

Publishers: Evaluate the advertising real estate on your pages and optimize placement for the best opportunity to be measured and seen. Disclose to clients which viewability solutions you employ and prepare them for possible discrepancies and reconciliation methods.

2. Recognize that not all invalid traffic is fraudulent but all fraud is invalid
There are several very good reasons a website may have for generating invalid traffic including internal traffic or test environments. But there are many more ways a site can generate fraudulent traffic, here’s what you can do to combat it:

Media Buyers: Ask your media partners how they detect invalid traffic. Only use vendors and technology partners certified to industry guidelines. Agencies should take the additional step of following the IAB’s best practices for workflow, campaign set-up, site tagging and measurement processes.

Ad Networks and Exchanges: Vet your inventory and continuously monitor it for changes. Provide advertisers with site-level information about where ads are running and who is seeing them. Become certified to IAB guidelines. Build brand safety technology into the ad server or domain engines that participate in RTB.

Publishers: Use internal controls to monitor traffic increases and implement ad tech solutions that are certified to industry standards. Perhaps most importantly, become certified against the IAB Quality Assurance Guidelines, which offer a framework for brand safety and trust throughout the industry.

3. Eliminate the bad players hiding behind good technology
Programmatic media buying has allowed advertisers to more precisely target audiences while helping publishers sell more inventory. It’s also created another avenue for potential fraud in the digital ad supply chain. Here’s what you can do to stop fraud:

Media Buyers: Only use exchanges that work with legitimate, validated publishers and take steps to refuse buying low-quality inventory. If the price seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Vendors: Get audited to IAB guidelines. Those vendors that comply with IAB measurement guidelines believe in providing accurate, reliable and consistent measurements every day.

Publishers: Avoid the temptation of buying undesirable traffic to fulfill commitments to advertisers. “Cheap” and “quality” traffic rarely go together.

The fact is that there’s no single answer to the issues facing digital advertising—but accountability and transparency are the foundation of any solution. Know your vendors and media buyers beyond just a name on a screen. Have a conversation and reach an understanding before a campaign begins. Support the work of the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) to add background checks and weed out the bad actors before they gain entrance.

Each of us can and must play a role in bringing transparency to the digital media ecosystem. If all sides of the industry come together against those that are infecting the system, we’ve got a real chance of creating a safe marketplace where everyone can transact with trust. Read AAM’s entire digital white paper series to learn more about the industry initiatives at play and find your role.

Guenther is vice president of digital auditing services at AAM. As a founding partner and vice president of ImServices Group—an Alliance for Audited Media company—he has more than 25 years of experience in digital technology auditing. Guenther has been instrumental in helping develop many of today’s key standards and practices for the interactive advertising marketplace including the IAB’s Quality Assurance Guidelines, various IAB Measurement Guidelines (including the MRC Viewable Impression Guidelines) and the IAB’s Ad Campaign Measurement Process Guidelines to name a few.

In 2014 AAM and ImServices merged. Guenther leads the integrated digital audit team in helping clients address fraud detection and prevention, ad delivery verification, viewability and brand safety through platform certification audits, independent validation through the IAB’s Quality Assurance Program (QAG) and MRC accreditation support that includes pre-audit assessments, a step now required by the MRC.

Advertising | Perspectives

Viewability 100% Guaranteed from Nativo and Moat

April 23, 2015 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

Viewability concerns have sparked a flurry of discussion, particularly around what should qualify as a viewable ad impression. The current standard, as established by the Media Ratings Council (MRC) last year, is for 50% of the ad to be in-view for at least one second. Not surprisingly, many marketers are calling for 100% viewability, despite the MRC’s expressed opinion that this is not yet feasible. Well, maybe not feasible for everyone, but some organizations are already striving to deliver.

Native advertising technology company Nativo has just teamed up with SaaS analytics and intelligence firm Moat to guarantee 100% viewability on native advertising for brand advertisers. According to Chris Rooke, Nativo’s SVP of Strategy and Operations, viewability has always been one of Nativo’s unique differentiators and this partnership is in keeping with that value proposition. Rooke says the company has traded media on a viewable CPM (vCPM) basis for years and built its technology stack to support both vCPM and CPM charge metrics from the start, which allows publishers to transact on whatever definition of viewability the client dictates.

The Moat partnership, he says, “represents the next step in this evolution by allowing third party verification. This closes the loop and ensures that equitable value can be realized by all stakeholders.” While Nativo’s standard offering aligns with the current MRC standard, the company can provide 100% viewability guarantee, verified by Moat, for a premium.

Not surprisingly, Jonah Goodhart, CEO and co-founder of Moat says that he hasn’t come across an ad buyer yet who “who believes they should be buying ads that are not there.” He points out that viewability is not format- or platform-specific and that it is clearly “reasonable that marketers want their ads to be seen across all formats and platforms.” The good news for native advertising content, says Goodhart, is that it is one of the most likely formats to be viewable.

Rooke says Nativo opted to partner with Moat because it was an early mover in the area and the first vendor the MRC accredited to accurately track viewability on dynamic in-feed units. The move is intended to be proactive by allowing brand advertisers to track viewability and reconcile against Nativo’s internal data. Nativo has also fully integrated Moat attention analytics into its platform, which Rooke believes “provides massive value to both sides of the supply chain.”

Though Nativo exclusively offers viewability pricing to its clients, the company currently sees only a small percentage of marketers buying the rest of their media on a viewable basis. However Rooke predicts that an increasing number of marketers and agencies will transact on it as more inventory is accessible on a viewable basis and third party verification becomes more broadly reliable.

Goodhart finds that content providers—from native to mobile, to video and even connected TV—are increasingly “pushing for viewability metrics.” He also sees signs that they are looking for other meaningful metrics, such as attention. And on the buy-side, he emphasizes that viewability doesn’t guarantee a successful campaign.

Rooke agrees, saying that “viewable units obviously perform better than non-viewable, but we find that it’s the quality of the promoted brand content and its contextual alignment to the surrounding editorial that ultimately determine how well a client’s initiative will perform.” Goodhart notes that marketers and publishers must continue to drive toward a world where viewability is a given, “that’s where we’ll get into effectiveness and solving for larger goals. Viewability—and humanity—are first,” says Goodhart, “but what comes next is where it will get very interesting.”

Viewability Article Header Image - Gorilla

Perspectives

Get the Facts Straight on Viewability

April 2, 2015 Jason Kint, CEO – DCN

It is the thousand pound gorilla: unavoidable. I’ve been in this job for about nine months now and haven’t found a conference where Viewability isn’t a major topic. Perhaps I should have seen it coming as I as I flew out to Vail, CO for Digiday’s Publishing Summit last week.

Digital Content Next (DCN) was hosting a private, invitation-only dinner at the Summit called “The Next Conversation,” where we worked hard to channel the conversation towards future goals, growth and opportunities. But first, I was slated to moderate Digiday’s Publishers Town Hall. I knew that the Town Hall would, in itself, be worth the trip given all of the attending publishers and the valuable opportunity to hear what was on their minds.

As I kicked off the discussion, weaving through the common themes of challenges for the modern-day publisher, I could sense the looming presence of the Viewability gorilla. Given that this new measurement currency is still working its way through the system, questions and blurred details continue to surface and many publishers in the room made it clear that Viewability remains top of mind.

In part, this is because marketplace confusion persists, despite efforts from the MRC such as George Ivie’s crystal clear statement last week in MediaPost. Listening to the ongoing Viewability discussion, combined with the concerns and issues raised last week at Digiday’s event, has crystalized a number of key aspects of Viewability for me.

So in the interest of clarity, here are some facts about Viewability that are frequently overlooked and which the industry needs to be clear on before we can move forward:

FACT: The viewable standard is absolutely critical to moving to cross-platform metrics.

FACT: Publishers who are in the business of having people actually consume their product will benefit from an ad marketplace that recognizes an advertising impression needs to be able to be seen.

FACT: The viewable impression standard set at one second for 50% of a display ad and two seconds for 50% of a video ad only represent the minimum opportunity to see an ad. This doesn’t mean the ads were actually viewed.

FACT: The viewable standard from MRC is non-negotiable. Yes, anyone can use it as a basis to negotiate on time spent with ads but that’s something different; something better defined as engagement.

FACT: The same exact set of ad impressions that are measured on Viewability have to be worth more, particularly if they are guaranteed to be viewable.

And now for the most important fact of all: Viewability has nothing to do with the consumer experience. It has nothing to do with why your customers value your product. As Ivie put it, “Viewable impressions represent the foundational change necessary in digital media to bring forward a comparable audience-based currency.” It is important that we quickly address these issues so we can refocus our attention where it is sorely needed.

Many companies are mired in this Viewability transition and, as such, they are failing to focus on design improvements and the evolution of their products. So the sooner we get the facts straight on Viewability, the better off our products, marketing partners and, most importantly, our consumers, will be.