EMEA > Ad Verification

Douglas de Jager is founder at spider.io.

Display ad exchanges have traditionally set out to solve a particular pain for advertisers: fragmented access to display ad inventory. Exchanges allow advertisers to buy ad inventory from a single source, an ad exchange, rather than engaging independently with each of the disparate underlying ad networks and publishers.

Until now the onus of selecting the best ad inventory from an exchange’s more abundant supply has been left to the advertiser. Indeed, the recent push toward real-time bidding has ostensibly been about empowering advertisers still further to choose the best available inventory. Between ad exchanges the battle has largely been about which ad exchange can grow its supply of ad inventory as quickly as possible.

In this article we see that advertisers do not have the tools necessary to select the best inventory across ad exchanges. Advertisers are buying ad inventory at scale across lower quality publishers without the ability to improve their selection of inventory. This means that advertisers continue to achieve lower ROI (return on investment) across ad exchanges than they could potentially achieve. With lower ROI, advertisers spend less.

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Brands are significantly increasing their investment in online video, but not all this new money is being spent wisely. When a market expands as rapidly as online video has, there are bound to be some red herrings. Right now, some serious mistakes are being made in the way that brand videos are being distributed.

Online video may be the fastest-growing medium of all time – spend was up by around 25% year-on-year in 2012 – but if it wants to continue to grow, it needs to deliver for agencies and, most importantly, clients.

What this means is that brands don’t want to discover their messages are untargeted, have appeared against poor quality content, or that they were costing up to 10 times what they should have expected to pay on an eCPM basis.

The reality, though, is that often the responsibility for this state of affairs lies with the marketers themselves. All too often they allocate a significant chunk of their precious marketing budgets to viral video companies in the hope that they can become the next Evian Roller Skating Babies or the next Old Spice Man, even when their content is clearly not suitable for this kind of treatment.

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The SafeFrames initiative is interesting because it emphasises that viewability is a very important topic. It shows that the industry is ready to make very important efforts to insure that ad-viewability will be correctly measured. Correctly means, “so robustly that it can be used for billing”. Many players in the industry dream of a world where unviewable ads are not invoiced anymore. The benefits will be shared among all the stakeholders and advertisers will, de facto, get more efficiency. Publishers may lose some inventory, but only the worst ones will be impacted. Ad-viewability will decrease the total inventory, which is the best way to increase prices.

This ideal world needs a robust viewability measurement method. Most viewability measurement companies have decent methods for non-iframes ads, but iframes make it more difficult. An iframe is a page within a webpage. Like all pages, it can be generated by any domain name, including a domain name different from that of the page where it is contained.

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The challenges of developing an industry standard for ad viewability rages on. The IAB (amongst other bodies) have attempted to bring some order to this via the Safe Frame initiative. ExchangeWire recently caught up with some of more progressive vendors in this space to get their thoughts on the initiative and whether it will provide the standardised framework the industry clearly needs. First up, is Spider.IO.

What are SafeFrames?

Currently there are two ways for a publisher to include display ads on a web page: inline or within iframes. This provides publishers with a stark choice.

By including an ad inline, a publisher is including an ad in the same way that a publisher would typically include, say, an image. This type of inclusion provides advertisers with full transparency into where ads are placed and it also allows rich ad interactions—in particular, it allows expansion and contraction of ads. However, this type of inclusion also allows negligent or malicious advertisers to break site functionality; to steal data from the host page or from the user; to rewrite any content on the host page; or even to redirect a user to a page on an entirely different domain.

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If you haven’t heard the name spider.io before, it is likely you are not alone. Like many good European ad technology companies, they have been flying under the radar. However, quietly but surely, they are building the technology which could change the way ad viewability is measured, and which could, in fact, bring viewability measurement to every ad impression across the industry.

For those unaware, the ad viewability space is pretty messy. In August, it was reported that comScore had launched a patent infringement lawsuit against three ad verification companies: AdSafe, DoubleVerify and MOAT. At the heart of this lawsuit are a set of patents controlled by comScore (but actually owned by Nielsen. See? It’s messy…) that govern an approach to measuring ad viewability used by almost everyone in the industry. In the industry this is termed the geometric approach. It involves comparing the size and the position of the ad against the size and the scroll position of the browser’s viewport. The result is a measure of whether the ad is within the browser’s viewport, and accordingly viewable.

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Stuart Byrne is Ebiquity’s UK Head of Digital

To see or not to see, that is the question. Too many digital ads never get seen. A huge chunk of digital display could be being seen by precisely no one. That’s advertiser money wasted and a poor buying strategy.

If this happened in outdoor, there would be an uproar, but just because an ad has been ‘sent’ to a computer – impression served – doesn’t guarantee that it’s actually seen, or even been rendered on a user’s machine.

Research that we’ve carried out in Germany shows that for many advertisers only 71% of their digital placements can actually be seen.

Based on diverse campaigns, and more than a billion served ads, the study found that while expandable formats were more likely to be seen by website users (80% visibility), some half-page ads were only 57% likely to be viewed.

It’s not just a problem in Germany. In the US, comScore has released software designed to measure the number of viewable impressions. Based on the principle that 50% of the ad must be visible for one second, a two-month study of campaigns for 12 big brands, including Kraft Foods, Ford and Sprint, found that 31% of 1.7 billion ad impressions were never in view.

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Hot on the heels of our Japanese launch, ExchangeWire is announcing today that it is rolling out a dedicated, localised site for the Brazilian market, www.exchangewire.com.br.

Brazil has one of the fastest growing digital advertising markets globally. The market is undergoing some huge changes in terms of ad technology adoption and the move to automated buying – with many local players either partnering with large ad tech providers or launching their own versions of buy and sell side technology solutions. ExchangeWire Brasil will be a native language site, and will deliver the best analysis and reporting on the Brazilian market.

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Jason Bigler is Director, Product Management at Google. In an interview with ExchangeWire, Bigler gives the full run down on the capabilities of the new DoubleClick Digital Marketing (DDM) suite, and what it will mean for agencies and advertisers. He discusses how the DDM solution will offer multi-channel optimisation (except of course, for the moment, social) – as well as a unified buy-side stack that incorporates all of Google’s buy-side features. The launch of DDM in Europe is expected throughout the year in what is likely to be a phased roll-out.

Just for the record, explain what encompasses the Doubleclick Digital Marketing (DDM) suite?

Put simply, it’s a new name for a new platform – a buy-side platform that will unify and fully integrate all digital media buying for marketers and agencies. It includes our upgraded ad server DoubleClick Digital Marketing Manager, our latest bid management solution called DoubleClick Bid Manager, DoubleClick Search, and DoubleClick Studio, which now includes Dynamic Creative. In addition, all of these solutions will be fully integrated into Google Analytics for holistic attribution modeling, deduplicated cross-channel conversion reports, and site traffic reporting all in a single UI.

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