Too many cooks: The viewability conundrum

By AdNews | 21 March 2014
 

Digital video advertising firm TubeMogul is pushing a free tool for any brand or ad agency that enables them to find out if consumers are actually looking at their video ads - and not just those bought through its own platform.

The digital advertising bodies are still trying to define exactly what viewability actually means and what is covered, with the IAB issuing a paper for comment last week.

In the meantime, companies are developing their own tools. Locally, publishers have expressed concerns that there could be confusion in the market if number of metrics roll out because they will likely show different numbers. Advertisers and agencies will likely plump for the lowest number of views, and therefore pay less to publishers, whereas the publishers would have more to gain from a metric that showed the highest number of views.

But TubeMogul reckons its Viewability Audit tool can be applied to any standard for video viewability that the IAB adopts.

It provides metrics and reporting into the rates at which video ads are watched, and applies to any video ad a marketer buys and is also designed to tell marketers why an ad is not getting watched, according to the company. Real-time metrics include how much of a video ad is in-frame, whether a viewer is in another tab or window, whether a video is muted, player size and how many ads are measurable.

“Brand advertisers deserve to know if someone had a chance to see their video ads,” said TubeMogul managing director Stephen Hunt. “Our Video Viewability Audit allows marketers to verify exactly where their ads run and know whether they were seen by the intended audience.”

Currently the IAB in Australia is looking into developing in-stream video ad standards from the middle of this year, and will likely address viewability.

TubeMogul said technology is powered by OpenVV, the open-source viewability software that it developed and launched last year, and also supported by a consortium of 21 companies, including Nielsen and TRUSTe.

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