While fraud, viewability and brand safety remain legitimate issues surrounding programmatic buying, specific value must be quantified for programmatic ad inventory tied directly to how consumers are impacted by the ad messages, according to Integral Ad Science’s Kevin Lenane.
The company’s GM of Video, Lenane believes that people are rightly beginning to place more emphasis on how much of programmatic ad inventory is actually being “watched” versus how much of it is just being “viewed.”
“Being watched directly correlates to brand lift and related measures,” says Lenane. “If you are a provocative advertiser you want to make sure your ads are carrying the most impact they possibly can. Because whatever your KPI’s are, you always benefit from viewers being more engaged and actually watching the content.”
Citing the plethora of videos and ads and the broad spectrum in which the two currently can be associated with each other, Lenane contends that what’s needed is a set of standards tied to “how much the message is carried into the viewer’s brain.”
Continuing to clean up the programmatic space involves not only weeding out the “nefarious stuff,” but to stratify programmatic inventory by value.
“Most people right now have a fixed kind of price that’s just a big slush of all this different kinds of inventory,” he says. “We need to have more of a layer cake of price and be able to flex and determine how much is this worth, how much is that worth.”
This video part of a series about the state of programmatic advertising sponsored by OpenX. Please find other videos from the series here.
