What Publishers Really Need to Know About Viewable Impressions
By Acceleration
In 2012, viewable impressions gained strong momentum as a new metric. Fueled by the IAB’s Making Measurement Make Sense (“3MS”) initiative and the prominence of new vendor solutions, it seemed as if viewable would be the story of 2012.
But genuine progress was slow and developments in viewable impressions were driven by entrepreneurship and desire, not practicality.
By mid-summer:
• Vendor methodologies were found to be partially or wholly inadequate for reasons ranging from iFrames to browser compatibility to sampling.
• Conflict emerged over previously-agreed-to measurement standards and taxonomies as stakeholders realised their implications and limitations.
• Many marquee publishers saw viewable impressions as a way to establish leadership among advertisers but did not have a solid go-to-market plan.
• Agencies agreed non-viewable impressions were of little or no value but did not agree that viewable ones were of greater value than assumed.
By Q4, discord was building between those wanting viewable percentages as a key metric and those wanting viewable impressions as a unit of pricing. Others simply did not know what to do.
The year ended with little to offer as a road map for the future. The current broadest set of premium publishers have been disappointed with results of vendor tests and are left wanting a strategic response to viewable impressions.
Our practice has advised numerous publishers in both North America and Europe on viewable impressions, benefitting from discussions with dozens of publishers, vendors and agencies. While much of our work has validated others’ findings, we find the following three ideas almost never get the attention they deserve:
• Viewable impressions are
not predictable. Ignorance of this simple fact is driving more confusion in the market than any other factor.
• An impression being
viewable is binary. As a result, viewability will bring a new dynamic to the impression-level buying promoted by Real Time Bidding (RTB).
• Viewable impressions will be
more disruptive to targeting and yield management than previously thought.
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What Publishers Really Need to Understand About Viewable Impressions (pdf, 166 Kb)