Goodbye viewability and hello time-based marketing?

Viewability has become the key metric for digital marketers in recent years, but is it starting to lose its relevance? Is time going to become the next key measure for brands?

Tristan Dickinson, senior performance manager for SocietyOne, told a panel at Oath’s Advertising in the era of IoT event this week that he sees viewability as an indicator of performance, rather than a benchmark to measure it against.

He said buying time is now more important to them as a brand, saying they have calculated it takes “six seconds” to influence someone’s decision for their products.

“That almost throws viewability out the window and you start to think, well to buy time, to buy six seconds, how many ad units do I need to buy? That’s where I’m a bit more interested in buying time as opposed to viewability,” he explained.  

Another panellist, James Perry, Head of Audience and Publisher Partnerships at Qantas Loyalty explained that while attribution can be complex, there are significant benefits of getting it right. 

 With an advantage of knowing who their customers are through deep data from their popular frequent flyer program and Red Planet products and services, Qantas continues to invest in building its capability to offer the right product to the right person in the right channel.

 “Ultimately we’re trying to deliver more meaningful, relevant and rewarding experiences to our customers and to do that it means understanding what they like and don’t like,” explained Perry. “There’s a large amount of investment and time that goes into attribution and improving what we can measure.”

 Data has an important role to play in that. “As a program that is based on loyalty, customers expect us to recognise their loyalty and understand them and data allows us to do that. It ultimately helps to increase their trust in the brand when they know we’re using it to deliver them a better customer experience.”

Dan Robins, APAC head of programmatic and data at Spotify, sees the industry in a transitory phase as publishers face the challenge of media sales moving from booked and delivered to the more flexible but complex real-time solutions.

Programmatic came about as the use of technology for publishers to be able to “sell the unsellable inventory” that the sales team were unable to sell elsewhere. It was sold at a price that was better than not – cheap – which meant advertisers jumped on it, purely for the maths.

Robins explained this led to programmatic being viewed as a channel – it was display with later video added on top of it.

Because the typical marketing team has so much on their plate outside of just the media buy, they’re typically the last part of the ecosystem to catch up. But because programmatic has moved at such a rapid pace, the wider industry has caught on and it’s no longer about getting rid of the revenue that wasn’t sellable.

“There’s this massive data opportunity to serve the right message, to the right person, at the right time: the real bit that we get excited about. But where we are today, we’re in that bit just between all the data, all the screens, all the speakers where we can be super real-time and great message but probably the mentality is often still living in the data-only or channel space. That’ll catch up really quickly,” said Robins.

Milan Markovic, performance commercial director at Publicis, described the programmatic market as “maturing”, saying while there may always be a lack of understanding, the industry is doing better considering just five years ago it was a “black box solution” with little transparency. As more technology practices are defined and developed out, the more transparency and understanding we see.

He stressed one of the most important things now is education.

“Programmatic is not rising as fast as it was, that’s a good sign that it’s maturing. With that we need to make sure that the conversation is maturing as well,” said Markovic.

These simple conversations should not just be about viewability – which “should be a hygiene factor” and not optimised into – but key benefits of programmatic in terms of price discovery and data-led buying.

“Often times I feel that gets derailed, but as the market matures and some of our practices fall into place and the dust settles, I think we’ll see some of those conversations that we have within digital and TV, those marketing conservations, get adapted down to programmatic. And we stop living in the weeds and we start looking at it as a top-line,” he explained.  

Adding a tech lens to the distinguished panel, head of Oath Ad Platforms Liz Adeniji questioned today’s current metrics and stressed the need to get away from things like viewability as we move to a more connected world where we’re collecting data from unassuming everyday items like fridges and mattresses.

The industry is ever-changing and evolving, and as we fast forward to the future in this connected world, we have more ability to target people. But how do we measure that? How do you measure success? What does viewability mean in an internet of things world with millions of data points coming in from unexpected places?

Perhaps it’s going back to old-fashioned metrics like ROI or sales to measure against real-world outcomes.

“There’s definitely a lot of education that needs to be done. We are entering uncharted territories, this is new for everybody in the room and I think collectively as an industry we’re going to have to figure it out together,” she said.