Programmatic Junkyard: Cheating Viewability
Viewability has upended the digital display ad market, though probably not in ways that buyers anticipated. Banners have been around for over 20 years now and they've been kept on life support through various "innovations" -- they got bigger, they popped up, they got heavier and more annoying thanks to rich media -- all in search of some metric (interaction rates, click through rates, brand awareness lifts) that wouldn't be dismissed as a rounding error. Time and again, banners have failed at the job but somehow the industry has steadfastly kept the format alive.
The biggest problem with banners is that nobody pays attention to them. The term "banner blindness" was coined in 1998. The second biggest problem is that around half of the banners that are being purchased today can't even be seen by anyone. They're either entirely fraudulent or they sit so far down the webpage that very few people ever see them. In an effort to keep publishers honest, the ad buying community developed ad viewability standards, which ensures that they will only pay when a majority of their ads can be seen.
Publishers -- some who are hurting for money to sustain quality journalism and others who are simply just excessively greedy -- have responded in kind by aggressively pushing their ad units higher up in the page. The classy way of doing this is to execute a redesign of a site that subtly integrates more viewable inventory. But redesigns take time and cost money. The trashy way of doing it is to simply jam as many banners in view so that buyers can check off the viewability box, user experience be damned.
In the age of programmatic efficiency, many publishers have struck a Faustian bargain and have opted for the easier option. And so consumers will now brace themselves for banners to once again pop out, seemingly in all directions, blocking the view of whatever content they were there to read or watch in the first place. If there is an implied contract between advertiser, publisher and consumer, surely this would break it. For the ad industry, it is yet another Pyrrhic victory for the banner, which lives to fight another day. Its sole purpose now is seemingly just to exist.
Account Director at UP THERE, EVERYWHERE
9 年I have a dream that annoying banner tactics disappear forever! The bottom line is that there are BETTER ways for publishers to make money without annoying their readers. Happy users + brand-safe environments - disruptive ads = more money!
Working on the Energy Transition and Homelessness
9 年Thanks Henry. The reality is that most publishers, even major ones, have neither the technical chops nor editorial capability to offer anything other than banners. Although there are certainly right and wrong ways to implement banners, and in the end the quality of traffic suffers and then revenues for publishers as a result. While it’s handy to trash the lowly banner, they keep the Internet running and present opportunities for native advertising to be a premium offering. It doesn't need to be an either-or scenario with banners and native, it should be: use the right product where it fits.