The IAB Believes…in maximising ad viewability
The IAB aims to achieve maximum viewability and consumer attention for advertisers’ online campaigns and is working with partners to develop consistent standards.
Statement from IAB UK … Digital ad spend is in rude health, representing an impressive £7.2 billion in 2014, up 14% on the previous year.
We’re in a fortunate position, then: few industries can claim to be enjoying such rapid growth.
That said, there are – as always – challenges. One of the more recent of these can be summed up in that familiar buzzword: Viewability.
But part of the problem is that the term is understood differently by different people.
There’s also the issue of inconsistency regarding its measurement. It’s for this reason that the IAB UK is working as part of the Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards (JICWEBS) alongside partner UK trade associations, and with our US counterparts IAB US, to refine viewability standards and certification.
“Want their ads to be seen and verified”
This is one of the top issues for the industry, as our UK CEO Guy Phillipson rightly points out. Obvious as it may sound, marketers want their ads to be seen and verified.
“We want to employ the right tools, so we’re not paying for invisible ads,” he says. “Accredited technology partners can verify exposure and dwell time of an ad, but they don’t all measure in the same way.
“Sorting out these discrepancies is an international challenge, but the industry has really good form in solving problems like this.”
We’re starting off by tackling standard display advertising. Once we’re satisfied with that, we’ll move on to construct a consistent viewability standard for video and mobile, too. As ever, it’s a case of one step at a time.
The aim is that the entire marketplace – agencies, advertisers and publishers alike – will benefit from improved quality, accountability and effectiveness when it comes to their digital campaigns.
Moving to viewable impressions
More broadly, it heralds a new era in delivery measurement for the advertising industry. Moving to viewable impressions offers the valuable prospect of guaranteed impact for advertisers. It means that digital media represents a more exciting prospect than ever before.
Hear a word of caution, however: This is about the ad being in-view so it has an opportunity to be seen. Its effectiveness, as ever, is down to the creativity, inventiveness and rigour of your teams. That, indeed, is the beauty of our industry.
The framework we are delivering will also provide us with a minimum benchmark and further proof – were it needed – that digital ad spend can be monitored more effectively than any other. Because with these minimum viewability standards we’ll be going further than any other mainstream media.
This should give us confidence in our ability to keep pushing the bar ever higher in an increasingly digital world.