OLV (video ads) not viewable, sound off measured by FouAnalytics

Let's start with a simple question -- what's your average completion rate for video ad campaigns? 90% or higher? Do you believe that's real? Do you watch 30 second video ads to completion? or do you skip the ads to get to the content?

One giant loophole bad guys have been exploiting

This has been staring us in the face since the beginning of video ads. Why? How? Everything is declared. And it relies on parties being honest and invoking the complete.gif pixel when the video ad is watched to completion. How many bad guys do you know that follow the rules, especially when the rules get in the way of their money-making?

Any standard that relies on parties to tell the truth is not good enough. Can you rely on bad guys to tell the truth? Of course not. If you are looking for high video completion rates, they will give you high completion rates, simply by invoking the complete.gif pixel even when the video ad was not viewed to completion, for example at 0.5 seconds or 1 second or 17 seconds, whatever. They can also invoke the firstQuartilePixel.gif, midpointPixel.gif, and thirdQuartilePixel.gif too any time they want. When these tracking pixels are invoked, the ad platforms record these as if they were the truth -- i.e. 1/4 of video ad was watched, half of it was watched, 3/4 of it was watched, or watched to completion -- even if these did not actually occur. Let me re-iterate -- the video ads did not play to completion but are reported as "complete" so the reporting you get shows average completion rates of 80- 90+ %.

the video ads did not play to completion but are reported as "complete"

Users left the page before video ad is completed

Consider the following data from FouAnalytics. unload_ms means the milliseconds at which the user left the page. The 514 - 17,414 means 0.5 seconds to 17 seconds. If 92% of the users left the page between 0.5 seconds and 17 seconds, how does a 30 second video ad get played to completion? Right, it doesn't. So why does your agency or ad platform keep reporting 90% completion rates or greater on your OLV (online video) campaigns? It's because of the giant loophole mentioned above on how video completions are recorded and reported. This also includes the video ad not played at all.

Video ads in display ad slots - video ad arbitrage

Bad guys are clever. They make money by buying low-cost display ad slots and selling it to you at video ad CPMs. This was such a prolific form of fraud that OpenX famously banned video ads in 300x250 in 2018 - https://www.openx.com/press-releases/openx-cracks-down-on-ad-unit-abuse-by-banning-300x250-video/ Folks still believe that in-banner video is what is happening. What is actually happening is the video ads loaded in display ad slots are not played with sound on (muted), multiple ads are run in hidden in the background and rotated every 2 seconds to meet the MRC standard of a "viewable video ad" when it was not viewable.

If you use FouAnalytics in-ad tags to measure your programmatic media buys, you can see video ads served into display ad slots. In the data grids below, you see video-arbitrage:1 on the left. On the right, you see the corresponding window sizes (yellow highlight) like 320x50, 300x250, 728x90, which are all standard display ad sizes, not video ad sizes. You also see in red highlight examples of pixel stuffing where the ads are running in 0x0, 0x50, 10x10, 0x8, 0x250 ad slots. Obviously these are not what people can see.

Actual data on video completes: 1-6% reach "thirdQuartile"

If you pull reports from your own verification vendor you will be able to see the following. Note that all of these video ads (media type = video) were delivered in mobile-apps. In each row, you can see the Q1 completed rate, Q2 completed rate, Q3 completed rate. Those correspond to the percentage of video ad impressions watched to those respective quartiles -- firstQuartile, midpoint, thirdQuartile, respectively. Note that the data in green appears to make sense because there should be drop-offs from Q1 to Q2 to Q3 as viewers leave the page (and therefore the ad). The 4th column is the measurement rate. Q4 (complete) must be equal to or lower than the percentage that completed Q3. All of these examples show thirdQuartile percentages in the single digits. That means most users left by the time 3/4ths of the video ad was viewed. There's no way that video ads can be watched to completion when only 1 - 6% of the users stayed through 3/4 of the video ad.

The reason video ads are marked at 80 - 90% complete rates is because bad guys can call the complete.gif tracking pixel even when they are not supposed to -- i.e. falsified the video completion rates. Now that you know this, do you think your OLV campaigns are working like you thought they were? If only a quarter of the users watched the first quarter of your video ad, what impact do you think your expensive video ads had? OLV is also far more expensive than display ads. Video ad CPMs are 5 - 10x higher than display ad CPMs. The table below is from FouAnalytics data in Q1 2024.

So what?

If users leave the page in 0.5 seconds - 17 seconds, then 30 second video ads cannot be played to completion even if the reports you get from platforms show 90% completion rates. Those completion rates are easily falsified because fraudsters can invoke the complete.gif tracking pixel at any time, even if the video ad was not actually played to completion. Video ads are 5 - 10X more expensive than display ads, but most people don't watch them. If only a quarter of users watched video ads through the firstQuartile, and only 1-6% watched through the thirdQuartile, how effective are your video ads at generating awareness? Right. Not very. Better to use display ads for 1/5th the CPM and generate awareness in the first 0.5 seconds. Nearly 0% of your video ads are played with "sound on" anyway so they don't have greater impact than display ads.

With all this new information, please let me know if you decide to pause your OLV campaigns or change them over to display campaigns (to save money and to get the same branding effect). For some of my clients, they are going back to their OLV "partners" and insisting that FouAnalytics javascript tags be run -- e.g. in VPAID environments -- so all of the following details can be independently measured:

• unload_ms -- when the user left the page, so we can verify if "completes" for 30s video ads are even possible
• what portion of the ad was actually watched -- were the tracking pixels invoked at the right times
• was the sound on (volume level detected by FouAnalytics) and did the video ad actually play

If the platform refuses to allow you to measure video ads with a FouAnalytics javascript tag, you are within your rights to NO buy from them any more, and go with partners, vendors, and platforms that DO allow you to independently verify the video ads you are buying.

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