COLOGNE — When the Media Ratings Council decreed a viewability standard for video advertising, many in the industry were thankful that the industry was coming to some sort of consensus Roll forward, however, and it seems people are looking for more.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Integral Ad Science CEO Scott Knoll says brands are pushing for a more granular understanding of which inventory is deemed viewable at different watch lengths.
That is because different brands create ads with different focal durations for different campaigns.
“Brands tend to right away understand that viewability is not binary,” Knoll says. “We can’t say it’s good or bad, it’s in view, it’s not in view, that time is a really critical element.
“In Europe, there are more brands who are adopting this, and we have dozens of brands here who have decided that MRC standard is not enough. The Group M standard doesn’t fit their needs, and they’ve created their own custom standard that’s specific to not just their advertising, but in some cases actually their creative.”
- The MRC holds that, for video, a “viewable” ad is one for which 50% of its pixels were seen for two seconds.
- Group-M one-upped the MRC by mandating a “viewable” video must have 100% of its pixels viewable – for at least one second.
Knoll walks Beet.TV through an example of why a brand would want more.
“Let’s say they have a campaign coming out,” he explains. “They do some tests. They recognize that their video is optimized to eight seconds, so then what they’ll do is, on every buy, they’ll measure how many seconds the ad was in view for, and they try to optimize to 8 seconds.
“So, they find the publishers who are giving them eight seconds or more, they work through programmatic where they can use signals from us or other companies to actually buy based on a high probability that they’re going to get eight seconds of view.
“Most of the market today is just counting it as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and these smart brands who are ahead of the curve are actually figuring out a lot of extra value for the same amount of money.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
