The IAB’s Viewability Standards, and Why They Stink

July 18, 2017

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How many of those digital ads made an “impression”? According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, all of them did. Yes,…

We here at Adimo were recently reviewing the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)'s "Viewability Standards" for digital advertising, and we decided to conduct an experiment.

We'd like to invite anyone reading this to participate. 

It's easy; all you have to do is watch the 34-second video below and count how many of the featured brands you can remember when the video ends.

Sound fair?

OK then...

 

How many of those digital ads made an “impression”?

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, all of them did.

Yes, an advertisement from which 50% of its pixels appear on a screen for but one single second is considered a “viewable impression” by the IAB.

Why?

Because the IAB’s viewability standards, as they currently exist, stink.

The IAB’s Viewability Standards, and Why They Stink

As with so many things digital, the road to the current state of affairs was paved with the good intentions of people who wanted to make things better.

Back in the good old days (from the interactive advertising agency’s perspective), “served impressions”-  counting how many times an ad had been served by an ad server, regardless of whether it was rendered on the screen fully enough and for a long enough time for consumers to see it – was the standard industry measuring stick. As long as an ad was “served” to a device, it counted.

Which didn’t make a whole lot of sense. How could an ad which hadn’t rendered or which had appeared on screen for only 0.0001 of a second make an impression on anyone?

Something had to be done.

The IAB steps in.

 

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, keen to shore up digital’s position as a worldwide marketing leader, decided to take action.

Which was a good thing.

Or so it seemed…

Sometime between identifying the problem and conducting  “exhaustive research with all the major players and working teams of leaders from across the ecosystem” it was decided that the solution was to shift from measuring “served impressions” to measuring “viewable impressions”.

Again, a very sensible conclusion.

But what, the IAB brain trust wondered, constitutes “viewable”, exactly? After all, you can’t measure viewable impressions until you decide what is viewable, can you?

And that’s when someone got to them!

Where we are now

via GIPHY

****Disclaimer! Dramatisation- May not have happened****

Did a shady agent from some slick interactive advertising agency really deliver a comically large sack of money with a dollar sign on it to the IAB office? Probably not. But the high-minded ideals of raising accountability in the digital media sector and laying the foundation for greater comparability with traditional media seemed to have fallen by the wayside nonetheless.

And so the “50% of pixels viewable on screen for one second or more” benchmark was born.

Is the IAB viewable impressions standard better than its served impressions predecessor? Yes.

Has it gone far enough to level the playing field for the brands and marketers who are paying for those impressions? No.

The skimpy viewability standards currently used to measure the impact of digital advertisements and their value has become yet one more arrow in the quiver for the major brands currently clawing their valuable advertising budgets away from digital and demanding more accountability.

Both the IAB and the digital advertising industry as a whole would do well to heed those demands.

 

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