Video Transcript: What Is Advertising Viewability?
Welcome to episode number 75 of The Great Reset. My name is Robert Brill. I'm the CEO of BrillMedia.co.
We're an advertising firm that helps companies drive sales and leads. We're here five days a week talking about marketing and advertising for senior marketing executives, entrepreneurs, and everyone who's looking for the advantage on how to grow their company. In today's episode, we'll talk about viewability and measurement as they relate to contextual targeting data.
And these contextual targeting companies, as we've been looking at in the last few episodes, are using web trackers to review sites across the web, measure the things that are happening on the sites, understand what the sites and the pages are talking about, and two really important outputs of that data from these contextual data companies is viewability targeting and campaign measurement. So let's jump right into viewability targeting. The value proposition is very straightforward here.
We need our ads to be seen for people to take action. If the ads aren't seen, then we don't want to run these ads. These tools allow advertisers to mandate a minimum viewability standard for campaigns across banner and video ads.
There are two components of the contextual targeting framework happening here. Sites are routinely scrubbed for user behavior to understand how people interact with an individual page and pages across individual domains and where ads appear on the page. So for example, ads that appear above the fold or on the top part of the screen when the page loads are more likely to be in view and therefore more likely to be seen by the consumer.
There's also technology that allows ads to appear on the side of the screen even while a user is scrolling and for those ads to be refreshed. And the reason that those technologies exist and the reason publishers have been changing the way that their ads appear on the screen is primarily because there's a push by advertisers for their ads to be measured as a viewable ad impression. So these are in view placements.
The more in view, the better it is for the publisher because the more they'll get paid for the ad impression and the better it is for the advertiser because you're likely to be driving better outcomes for the advertiser. Reporting and measurement on this gives advertisers knowledge about the sites and apps that have the highest in view rates. So further contextual targeting companies allow advertisers to exclude ads that don't have minimum viewability metrics.
Now let's move on to measurement. When we talk about measurement, we're really interested in translating digital ad delivery to reach and frequency and gross rating points. And if you've ever bought television, radio, you'll know that traditional media is standardly transacted on gross rating points.
The percentage of people that are seen across a given market or TRP, target rating points, the percentage of people that are seen across a very specific demo such as people 18 to 35. So there's been a push over a couple of years where digital ad delivery that is transacted on an impression level basis has the ability to translate into how many gross rating points and targeted rating points digital advertising is delivering. Now, a separate conversation which we haven't discussed is which is the dominant factor, which is the dominant protocol for measurement.
And I'll have the opinion that it appears that impression delivery is becoming a more dominant way of measuring delivery. But when you consider that 52% of advertising is happening programmatically, it still leaves 48% of delivery of advertising that is happening primarily on GRP and TRP rating points. So it's possible that in the future, we'll see a translation into impression delivery rather than a real focus on gross rating points and targeted rating points.
So in addition, these tools have the ability to report back on the types of users who saw our ads. These measurement capabilities are really focused in on connecting traditional media and digital media in a unified measuring system. So for example, measurement has the ability to identify how many ad impressions went to people 35 to 54 and 65 plus and 54 to 65 and 18 to 35.
And you can break out in a number of different ways by age and gender. So this is especially important if your ad targeting is 35 to 54. And again, this goes back to how brands typically in the past have been running advertising.
The core idea is before digital advertising was so prevalent and so precision, most brands would run ads targeting broad swaths of audience. Like I don't care who I'm targeting as long as I'm getting 10% of all United States people, 35 to 54. That could be a brand target.
So in order to do that at scale, you need television and radio. As digital became prevalent, you saw large brands saying, hey, I'm glad that I'm targeting a bunch of people, but this doesn't, digital advertising doesn't actually translate into how we run traditional media. So there is a disconnect.
And this measurement capability also has the ability to unify the measurement across traditional and digital media. But again, as traditional media loses its dominance and digital media becomes a prominent media buying medium, I should say, we're really getting to a place where the primary transactor, the primary measurement is an impression level data set. And we can get much more granular than age and gender.
So measurement is good, especially for large brands, for small brands and medium-sized business, measurement is not as important as the actual business outcome. Is the advertising driving sales and leads. So you can see, while we really focused in on contextual targeting as the core capability in especially with the last videos that we've been showing you, the underlying technology is deployed in a variety of use cases and systems throughout the digital advertising ecosystem.
And it really speaks to how nuanced digital advertising actually becomes and how many different use cases it has for different advertiser needs. That's it for this episode of The Great Reset. We will see you tomorrow.
