When the Media Ratings Council (MRC) released its viewability standard in 2014, it was a huge step forward for online digital advertising.
Going back to the early days when I started my first digital business in 1999, publishers unwittingly filled their web pages with ads with little thought for whether they were going to be seen, flooding the market with ads delivered out of view. Until the industry came to realise that there was a problem and eventually, the MRC standard adopted by most of the industry trade bodies – that 50% of pixels must be within the viewable area of the browser for one second – became the definitive metric against which to optimise ad campaigns and at about the same time, I’d already been developing a tool to help publishers overcome this issue, originally called RevealingAd, then Signal and now a part of Sovrn.
But four years later the limitations of viewability, and its inadequacy as the goal of digital advertising alone, are clear. Changing online behaviours and the emergence of new ad formats are leading advertisers and platforms to set their own viewability benchmarks, so does relying too heavily on viewability mean that we are optimising to the wrong metric?
So why is viewability vastly overrated, and what should the digital advertising industry be aiming for instead?
Read the whole article here: Display Advertising: Why Viewability Is Vastly Overrated
Source: PerformanceIN
Article length: 1015
Article reading time: less than 5 minutes
