Time-Based Advertising 101

Sled was founded on the premise that attention is at the core of the media business. In ad-supported models, publishers capture attention and transfer a portion of it to advertiser messages that foot the bill for content creation.

Mediums vary in how they package up attention for sale to advertisers. TV has the 30 second spot, print has the full page ad, and digital has the “impression.” All of these formats ostensibly act as proxies for the amount of attention being traded.

The impression is an incredibly easy-to-measure metric that is unfortunately not very representative of the amount of attention transferred. Think about the varying amount of attention you pay to the hundreds of digital ads you are exposed to per day?—?some might capture a few seconds or even minutes of attention, while the vast majority fall victim to banner blindness.

Thankfully, advertising technology is one of the most innovative industries out there and several firms are working towards metrics that are more closely correlated with attention.

Two years ago, the viewability of digital media was called into question. Companies like Moat, IAS and Double Verify brought solutions to market to help advertisers measure the viewability of their campaigns and the industry settled on a threshold of 1/2 the ad on screen for 1 second. This criteria, while a step forward, was broadly criticized for its simplicity and has led to some riveting debates.

Some marketers, like Group M with their 100% in-view requirement, have set different standards, pushing the flexibility of buying platforms. The silver lining of the viewability kerfuffle has been the creation of technology that makes it possible to measure how long ads are on screen for and a general awareness of time’s importance.

Recently, marketers have started to experiment with transacting on these metrics. The FT announced over $1m in media spend on a cost per hour (CPH) basis. The FT’s implementation uses adjacent placements and Chartbeat’s platform to measure time and doesn’t charge for time until a 5-second in-view threshold has been met. Nikul Sanghvi’s documentation of the FT’s process is required reading for anyone interested in the space.

Web Spectator has a similar offering, called GTS for Guaranteed Time Slot, that also uses adjacent advertising. Web Spectator has been MRC accredited to sell on time.

At Sled, we released our own time-based advertising product called Parsec earlier this summer. Parsec uses high impact placements that capture 100% of attention while an ad is in view. We believe the time consumers choose to spend with advertising is a much more powerful metric than adjacent time on screen.

Cost per second advertising, whether measured in time spent or time on screen, is revolutionary because it aligns all parties in the digital advertising ecosystem around creating relevant and engaging ads. The team at Sled looks forward to helping advertisers take advantage of time-based advertising to more efficiently acquire media.