Flush with $50 million in Series C funding, Moat has taken on the lofty goal of creating an accepted currency for digital advertising because it believes the industry is stuck on measuring viewer impressions.
To Jonah Goodhart, co-founder and CEO of the Web media analytics company best known for tracking viewability of digital ads, “human” and “viewable” are mere table stakes.
“From our perspective, we need to go way beyond that. Human and viewable doesn’t mean that it worked,” Goodhart says in an interview with Beet.TV at last month’s LUMA Partners DMS event. “It doesn’t mean it was effective and that a consumer ultimately is paying attention and that they’re ultimately going to be influenced by a marketer’s message.”
Moat’s aspirations put it up against some of the industry’s most formidable players, including Google and other metrics providers, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Goodhart refers to the current Internet Advertising Bureau digital ad viewability standards as “minimum thresholds,” adding, “The standards were not meant to be the maximum goal, effectiveness or anything of that nature.”
Moat wants to enable both marketers and publishers to measure the signals that make sense to them. This, Goodhart believes, will “move the industry forward.”
Asked about his expectations for the upcoming Cannes international advertising festival, Goodhart thinks the industry needs to get to a place where audience, creative and user experience become part of the conversation again.
“I think for a long time we’ve been stuck, and part of the reason that we’re stuck is because we’re still transacting in old ways of doing things,” Goodhart says of impression-based measurement. “Our hope is that by cleaning up the industry to a degree, by removing the incentive for non-human, non-viewable activity, we’ll begin to have a better conversation about creativity.”
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
