The Need For A Visibility Metric In Display

Wayne Blodwell is Digital DR Manager at Arena Media. Here he argues why there is now a need for a visibility metric in display.

One of the things that has never sat well for me in online display advertising is visibility of the ads. Now I don't mean whether or not the ad is above or below the fold, I mean how long that ad has been viewed for by the user.

For example, if I asked you if you wanted a 728x90 placement at the very top of a newspaper site or a 300x250 placement to the bottom right of the page, which would you choose? If I was to say that I would expect people to scroll down the page as soon as the page loads because they want to get to the content, would this change your opinion?

What this highlights is that above and below the fold targeting aren’t the best metrics to judge how engaging an ad placement is to a potential buyer.

We're currently buying and optimising media based on the assumption that somebody has seen that ad for long enough to have made an impact on them to go ahead and convert, and also fighting the display corner saying how Display ‘influences’ another channels conversion. This is a hard sell when we really can’t track a user’s viewing engagement.

Where does this problem really lie in the industry though? Branding display campaigns!

There's been a lot of discussion about gaining marketing dollars from other channels, primarily TV and bringing that money online into Brand (will save my thoughts about brand marketing through DSPs until another day). When Display guys are going to marketers who may have been brought up on TVR's and Impacts, how can they really sell in an impact of a display ad? CTR? Exposed vs non-exposed surveys? Post-view conversions? All are fundamentally flawed.

It's scary to think that early reports show that one third of online display buying isn't even seen, and one third of ads are seen for less than 15 seconds!

Think how that affects pricing with certain media partners? Multi-million pound deals, and some partners might have a lower viewability rate than another partner who you don’t have a deal with. Remember this is for branding campaigns where the pricing is higher as you are paying for ‘premium positions’, but actually lots of this may be a waste.

Some people say that we're not ready for ad viewability yet, I disagree. We are absolutely ready for it and should be investing the time and money into making online display an attractive proposition, not pumping money into the best ways to 'game' the system. Advertisers we want to welcome to the online display space need this metric, without it, they'll keep buying their TVRs and Impacts and running some supporting PPC.

We need to ensure advertisers expectations are correctly managed if we are to embrace a viewability metric. At Arena Media we want our clients to be fully aware of what they can do right now through our in-house automated buying platform, but also be aware of the next opportunities – which ad viewability certainly is for brand campaigns. The advertisers just need to be confident in what this actually means and how we can use it effectively in our media buying.

Wayne Blodwell co-works across the in-house trading platform at Arena Media and oversees Display buying strategy.