'100% viewability' sounds good but isn't a magic wand solution

I’m calling bullshit on 100% viewability.

While it’s been the catchcry for some in the industry this year, “100% viewability” in its primitive form is about giving a user the opportunity to see our advertising in a digital environment. What we should be focusing on are the idiosyncratic behaviours of the audience and making a leap towards ‘human-centricity’.

Our ‘effective exposure’ approach at Dentsu Aegis Network seeks to redefine our measurement architecture. With less focus on viewability, instead we have placed a concern on accountability, applying a lens of engagement across the audience we are trying to communicate with.

This approach has been 16 months in the planning, during which time we’ve made significant headway in understanding the needs of our clients, partners and audiences. I strongly believe in creating partnerships which encourage an environment where we can all afford to test fast, fail fast and adjust fast for the betterment of not only the client but the industry as a whole.

Our approach to agnostic screen planning at Dentsu Aegis Network has sought to justify, measure and prove the direct relationship between all screens, beginning with television and online video. Effective exposure proves that video has a performance and branding role to play.

We have conducted three market-mix modelling and research exercises, with the results showing that television and online video are best planned and bought together. Incrementally, when bought together they deliver a 60% stronger ROI and a 10% uplift in brand recall, which is greater than just television alone.

We now know that even if audiences see digital ads, and give them their full attention, the effect is very different to the effect traditional mediums like print and TV have on passive ready-made viewers. The biggest challenge we now face is the range of measurement systems available in the ecosystem, with billable events, impression counting and forced viewership varying profoundly from publisher to platform.

We are now entering the '4th revolution'. Just as we passed through mechanisation to mass-production then computation, we are now entering an age of intelligent systems. Partners like Integral Ad Science become part of our technology arsenal, working with us to solve business problems instead of just being able to propose advertising shaped solutions.

What we are actively working on now is how dramatically creative quality can affect outcomes, as the lines between media and creative become ever more blurred.

We have embarked on testing the quality of media that an ad is placed around, as it has a direct impact on the user's perception of that ad. It is not just about the volume and scale of the impressionable reach.

Placement vs human level

The way we as an industry are measuring viewability is largely at the impression or placement level vs at the human level. If we are treating all viewable ads as equal, an ad that is viewed by a person for one second is as valuable as an advert viewed for ten seconds.

This is inaccurate, undervalued and doesn’t respect the role of extraordinary creative. Within Amplifi and Data2Decisions, we are testing methodologies to prove those exposed to an ad and the frequency they are exposed has a direct impact on recall, recognition and purchase behaviour.

James Diamond, managing director of Integral Ad Science, shared his view with me: "In testing we have found that a combination of eight exposures for a total duration of 50-60 seconds resulted in the highest incremental conversions. While the right exposure time and frequency may differ between brands and channels it's clear that advertisers need to be able to pull both levers to optimise, and that optimisation needs to be done at a user level. This type of targeting is simply not possible in traditional TV.

“Ultimately advertisers want each consumer in their target segment to be exposed for a certain amount of time to their brand. In digital the capabilities to transact on exposure time for a target consumer are not that far away.”

We are one step closer to introducing an equal currency for screen planning and buying, however we need the industry and our media partners to work with us on a comparable metric that focuses on business solutions rather than advertising outcomes.