SEMPL 19: JAN JILEK, CEO, Dotmetrics Croatia

Editor's Notes

1. Hello ladies and gentleman I’m going to talk about ad viewability and transparency. But to talk about that topic, first, we have to take a quick tour through the history of the World Wide Web.
2. Twenty years ago the World Wide Web didn't look like it looks right now. It was much slower, from all points of view. Servers were slower, computers were slower, and the Internet connections were slower. There was basically no opportunity for the user to watch, for example, a video using a normal internet connection. Some of you probably remember that time.
3. So how did websites look at that time? And what kind of companies were the first to use it for commercial purposes? Obviously the print publishers, their content already contained a lot of text which was appropriate for the internet speed at that time and included just a few pictures. What was and still is ad business model for print publishers?
4. What are you buying when you advertise in print? Are you buying viewable ad impressions or are you buying the opportunity to see? The reach for print publishers is calculated as the number of people who were exposed to the medium? Did everybody who has been exposed to the newspaper see all the ads in that newspaper? Print publishers still don't have a way to measure ad viewability, if they had, they would probably do it a long time ago and we wouldn't be having this discussion right now. Since print publishers were the first to embraced the web as their medium of choice, they have also replicated their business model on the Internet, but with a few twists. They have increased transparency with the number of impressions, and they have also added clicks. As you might also remember, one of the first things IAB regulated in the US was counting of impression – impression can be counted only when the ad is fully loaded on the terminal equipment of a user.
5. However things are changing, browsers are much more advanced, servers are faster, as are devices for accessing the internet, and Internet connections and the web is partially transforming into a video medium. But video ads are measured differently in offline.
6. When it comes to TV ads we have GRPs, and GRPs are calculated through reach and frequency.
7. We, web advertising professionals, have often tried to calculate GRP for display ads. And it looked easy, reach times frequency equals a number of impressions for us, but something was missing.
8. What we were missing is time spent with an ad. Total ad viewability and time spent with and an ad comes naturally to TV advertising and because of that, it is not included in the formula for GRP.
9. If we add 30 seconds to GRP we will get how many seconds the populations has spent with a TV ad.
10. But let's get back to the web. Now when the web is progressing and mixing TV and print, measurements are also progressing. We have taken some things from TV and now we are starting to measure ad viewability. And yes, what is important for advertisers is how much time the ad was in contact with a user.
11. If you ask me, time will be the future currency for online ads also. There are already adtech companies which are working in the field and one of those companies is MRC accredited for their GTS – guaranteed time slot – display ad which is viewable by the user for 20 seconds.
12. But there is still a long road ahead of us. For example, my company, also measures pageviews, and why are pageviews important? Because they are containers for the ads. With today's technology, there is no other reason for pageview to exist. We are technically equipped to ditch pageviews and switch to time as a currency.
13. I think that by switching to time as a currency for online advertising, we will start a new renaissance. But can we change the whole industry overnight, unfortunately, no.
14. And now we are coming to the issue of transparency.
15. What do you think, is transparency one-way street or something more complex?
16. Today there is a lot of pressure from clients and agencies for publishers to provide them with ad viewability metrics. Research shows that 40% of all impressions are not viewable. Now that we are able to measure them everybody wants to buy only viewable impressions. However, nobody wants to pay more for them. Especially not 100% more. Clients are asking agencies, what have we been buying so far? Weren’t all impressions viewable? The answer is – no, not all impressions were viewable and because of that there were and there still are different prices for different positions on a webpage. If the ad is at the bottom of the page you will pay less because there is a bigger probability that user won't get to see it. So yes, even before ad viewability measurement ad viewability was integrated into the price of the ad impression.
17. But now we can calculate it for every position, for every ad, and clients and agencies have to be responsible enough to let publisher recalculate their pricing. Because if publishers have to be transparent to agencies, and agencies have to be transparent to clients, clients have to show responsibility to agencies and agencies have to show responsibility to publishers. It is a process which will last for some time. And even though my company can measure ad viewability for the whole market we chose not to because we also want to be responsible and let ecosystem rearrange itself and renegotiate the usage of the new currency.
18. So, if you ask me if transparency is a one-way street, my answer is no it is a two-way street in which responsibility comes from opposite direction. We are all responsible for the market in which we are operating, and if we show responsibility to the market, the market will respond with transparency.