Why aren’t all ads viewed?
Viewability. Ok, place your eyes back to the front of your head, I know they’ve rolled 👀
Symptoms
For media buyers and sellers, viewability is a bit like a blister on the back of your heel, it’s always there, it rubs and it hurts like hell. Sometimes, you forget about it for a bit, but it’s always there.
Brands and agencies are putting the pressure on their partners to ensure that their online ad campaigns are viewed by humans 💪 This pressure is inevitably passed down the daisy chain and will soon be felt fully by DSPs, SSPs and Publishers.
Particularly when publishers do direct deals, viewability is a prominent concern and it is currently used as a negotiation point from the agency or buyer 💷 Publishers are asked if they can guarantee viewability, and of course, they can’t. Therefore the agency pushes down price or asks the publisher to over deliver on impressions.
Current Diagnosis
Most publishers are using various tools either within their ad-server or through 3rd parties to measure their ad viewability. Giving themselves a viewability score. In some of our recent conversations, publishers are seeing different results depending on the third party or provider they are using 🚫
Why is it currently acceptable to just have a ‘score’? Anything less than 100% is not good enough.
If viewability is a blister, or even worse, a disease. Then the current treatment methods are poor or non-existent. The status-quo at the moment is to diagnose, there is currently no vaccination and no cure 💊 💉
Brands and agencies can protect themselves slightly by using viewability concerns as a point for negotiation, it’s not ideal but it’s working for now. Whereas publishers have a really tough job, they are having to play around with ad placements to bump up their ‘score’. They’re plastering up that blister and maybe even wearing two pairs of socks, but it’s still there and it still hurts 😩
On mobile in particular this means that the favoured ad-format is a 320x50 banner ad stuck to the top or bottom of the page. It’s the only ad-format where a publisher can guarantee viewability (Sigh) �😢😄
Prevention
@nownative ✋ we think we’re onto a vaccination . It’s not around diagnosis and treatment, it’s about preventing publishers from ever serving non-viewable or fraudulent advertising 🙌
100% viewability of online ads can be guaranteed �
Simple, we only serve ads that are guaranteed to be viewed by a human ✅ We prevent and vaccinate, we don’t just diagnose. Your viewability rate is now 100% and you’re cured 💯
@nownative ✋, we call this technical integrity. We pride ourselves in guaranteeing the technical integrity of every ad impression we serve. We only ever serve ads that are guaranteed to be viewed by humans.
We’re doing this through our first product, pre-content ads. Where we serve a mobile ad during a users transition from one article to the next (during content load time). Therefore, these ads are guaranteed to be seen by a human.
We’ve by no means got this all figured out, but we think we’re on the right path. If you’d like to learn👂more about our product and our approach please get in touch 💬
Right ad, right place, right value.
