33Across CEO Eric Wheeler argues that the industry needs to move past baseline measures of fraud and viewability, to target and test metrics like share of voice, time in view and ad position on page, that have a real impact on advertising effectiveness.
Programmatic advertising has a quality control problem, but it’s probably not the way you think. We have an opportunity to deliver value for all parties involved — publishers, advertisers, platforms, and of course, the users — but it requires a shift in thinking that frankly, I’m not sure the industry can handle. We need to move away from triaging quality after a media transaction to optimizing deals based on quality before they ever happen.
In a market where people spend nearly six hours a day interacting with digital media, companies like Vox Media somehow miss their revenue targets despite attracting upwards of 78 million readers per month. All signs point to the need for better models for valuing and transacting against all of this time spent.
To do this, the industry needs to begin accepting attention-based metrics. And if you think we’re already doing that — after all, what’s a page view or a click, if not a measure of attention — then I’ll throw down the gauntlet and argue that we don’t transact based on attendance at all. Let’s discuss.
Digital advertisers, publishers and platforms currently transact based on a print standard of CPMs tied to pages. However, better devices and more bandwidth have led to content and advertising experiences comprised of rich sight, sound and motion. And while technology is now able to value impressions based on their potential to capture attention, the measurement standards clearly haven’t kept up with growth and innovation in the space.
