The Internet Advertising Bureau set out it’s new ‘baseline standard’ for display ad impressions this week, stating that 50 per cent of the pixels in a display banner must be visible for a minimum of one second to qualify as an impression. Andrew Goode, Chief Operating Officer at Project Sunblock comments on why the IAB’s guidelines on viewability don’t go far enough.
Categorising an ad as viewable if it’s shown for one second, is not enough to tackle the problem. Viewability has been a hot topic for the ad industry for a while now, but there’s yet to be any real improvement, with nearly 50% of digital ads still being viewed for less than one second.
The reality is that even if the IAB can strong-arm the industry into full scale adoption of their standard, there’s no way of policing it and even if there was, it says nothing about the effectiveness of that one second.
Thousands of ad impressions wasted every day because advertisers have no insight into where their display ads end up. For example, according to the IAB, at least a third of display impressions are served to non-human traffic; bots are smart and they’re spectacularly good at evading capture and so the problem will only get worse if advertisers don’t act.
Whilst advertisers go on buying display ad impressions through automated buying cycles such as Real Time Bidding, they’ll continue to be totally blind to where their ads are being served. Unless they take proactive ownership of where and for how long their ad impressions are displayed, they’ll risk ploughing money into the bank accounts of illegal websites or to those people who’re out to profit from scamming the system.”
Andrew Goode
Chief Operating Officer
Project Sunblock
http://www.projectsunblock.com/