HOLLYWOOD, Florida – Has the pendulum begun to swing from advertising and media’s preoccupation with digital viewability to audience quality? It’s a trend that comScore executive Aaron Fetters is seeing on the buy side—along with a keen desire to clean up “a mess” of an ecosystem.
“We finally seem to be going a little bit beyond just the discussion of viewability and fraud and getting back to how does that combine with audience,” Fetters says in an interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “I’m hearing the buy side really begin start to ask again am I getting the audience I thought I was buying.”
Now SVP, National Agencies & CPG Business at comScore, less than two years ago Fetters was on the buy side, as Director of Global Insights at the Kellogg Company. He thinks it’s a positive sign that the industry seems to be moving beyond a sole concentration on viewability, fraud and eliminating waste.
“It think we’ve probably made a lot of progress in beginning to eliminate a lot of the waste in the ecosystem, but now I’m seeing the attention turn back to it’s not enough to just know that I’m getting a quality impression,” Fetters says. “I want to know who’s seeing that impression.”
Addressing the digital ad ecosystem, Fetters expects the consolidation among ad tech providers to continue. “Clearly we’re seeing it week after week, month after month,” he says.
It cannot happen fast enough, according to Fetters. “I think if you look at some of the campaigns that are running today, where you may have three, four, five, six tags on an ad to do various measures or activities against that ad or to collect data. Marketers are realizing this is too much and this is a mess,” he says.
Alluding to remarks at the IAB event by Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Mark Pritchard, Fetters acknowledges that marketers have mostly allowed the digital ad ecosystem to be managed for them. But that’s changing.
“Now they’re kind of stepping up and saying how much of my working dollar is going against non-working activity and can I be more efficient with that,” says Fetters. I think we’re going to see a big move toward simplifying the execution of ad serving, how do we get ads in front of consumers.”
It’s a question of necessity, according to Fetters, “because the buyers are starting to take notice, the buyers are starting to demand it.”
He says it’s fascinating to see the expanding desire by brands to build more targeted TV plans to reach specific audiences. And while addressable or programmatic TV “may be not quite scalable today, it certainly is not stopping the same idea of using data to build television-based audience in a new way.”
This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
