Digital media is a prime example of this phenomenon. Metrics like viewability and video completion rate have created clear incentives and predictable outcomes: The more impressions or video completions, the better. Since neither has a robust defense against gaming, publishers can create endless video completions and viewable impressions.

The challenge for digital marketers is the same as that faced by Munger and Buffet, identifying metrics that are aligned with their interests and difficult to game. Recently, a movement has emerged promoting attention metrics as a potential solution.

Increased video consumption gamified metrics

In the beginning of the web, some of the reported impressions advertisers received weren’t even rendering on publisher pages. Advertisers fought back with viewability, requiring an ad to be 50% on screen for a second or two. Predictably, products were built to help publishers maximize — or game — the attempted quality measure.

Then, as video consumption shifted to digital mediums, spending against online video advertising ramped up. In addition to viewability, video buyers layered on the metric of completion rate — the number of times a digital ad finishes playing.

The products dreamed up to game video completion rates were so brazen that advertisers commonly found that the totals outperformed viewability. How could a 15-second video playing through to the end occur more frequently than the ad itself appearing on screen for two seconds? As Digiday reported, vendors simply kept the video playing after leaving the screen.

Metrics like viewability and completion rate created predictable incentives. And the outcomes were just as foreseeable — a deluge of display placements and tiny video players.

This creates a problematic situation for premium publishers, as the true quality of placements isn’t reflected in price. A hard bargain emerged; publishers could either sacrifice their readers’ experience or lose revenue to publishers willing to do so.

Defining and measuring media quality can level the playing field

An equally tricky situation exists for media buyers whose clients have tasked them with finding the cheapest viewable impressions and video completions. While most know they aren’t getting the best value for their clients by optimizing this way, they are incentivized to do so.

Today, tiny video players with inherent high viewability and completion rate will command higher CPMs than large video players with lower viewability and completion rates. These incomplete measures of quality fail to consider a placement’s contribution to business outcomes, resulting in inaccurate calculations of media value.

Other markets have fixed this problem by adopting metrics that are harder to game and more closely connected to outcomes, like how …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron