FORT LAUDERDALE — So you’re an advertiser and you only want to pay for ads that humans can actually see? Be careful what you wish for – today, that may be like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
“They believe they should have always been paying for the viewable impression,” Jane Hong, Google DoubleClick’s head of industry for CPG advertisers, tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “So a lot of advertisers want to jump to that immediately and are asking for 100% viewability.”
Despite recent standardization of what “viewability” means and new ad tech platform capabilities to ensure it, we’re not there yet, Hong says: “I think we’ll eventually get there – viewability should be currency. We’re in that transition period right now – there’s a bit of education (to do) in terms of setting expectations.”
So what are the present pitfalls in giving advertisers what they want? “There are some limitations today as far as potential scale loss if you do that,” Hong says. “Technically, if an advertiser wants to push for 100% viewability, you can get fairly close – the question is, at what price of inventory does that make sense? How much inventory is there really at that point?
“A little over 50% of inventory that Google sees holistically across all our publishers is viewable. What does that mean for the economics of our industry if we just suddenly said, ‘That’s it’?.”
DoubleClick introduced viewability monitoring for display ads last year and for video ads this year.
Hong was interviewed at Beet.TV’s Beet Retreat annual get-together in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
The Beet Retreat ’15 was sponsored by AOL and Videology. Please find additional videos from the event here.