Digital, in comparison to other media, has given us the opportunity to really look deep into our advertising. When compared with other media, where measurement is based on widely extrapolated data, digital can give a lot more accuracy. Every click, like, comment, share or second viewed is recorded and analysed to measure the effectiveness; however, I think that we have got lost in this and dismissed the core principle of advertising – delivering our brand message to our audience. “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure,” is referred to in economics as Goodhart’s Law. I believe this could not be truer than when referring to commonly used digital metrics.
Clicks can be a good thing, but we also need to look beyond, into site analytics and quality of traffic – yet be mindful this still doesn’t give us the full picture. Digital advertising, just as any other, can be just as successful by simply delivering the right message to the right audience. We have seen TV drives search; if we could theoretically measure which spot drives action on TV, we wouldn’t focus on this and disregard the role of branding – but for a long time that’s what has been happening on digital. Attribution is advancing measurement; for example, we can see a correlation between display/video and search. People see an ad, open a new tab to search and, although we are still associating success with behaviour, there’s a lot we can understand about capturing consumers’ attention despite not inciting any direct action.
The digital industry’s measurement was built around clicks, yet it’s predominantly traded on impressions – in turn creating a double-edged sword for publishers to deliver on. People visit websites because they like the content – and advertising predominately funds this – however, we may have forgotten the most important element, the user. Through ad-blocking, the user exchange is diminishing; it affects publishers most, yet agencies, advertisers and publishers could be seen as jointly responsible.
Within our region, ad blocking is estimated to be around the 20 per cent mark, while globally it is as high as 40 per cent. A study by Adblock Plus references the main drivers: 64 per cent – intrusive/annoying ads, 54 per cent – ad disrupting what I’m doing, 36 per cent – page load issues, 33 per cent – offensive/inappropriate ad content.
Our quest for response has driven bad practice. Publishers have had no choice but to expand ad slots to try to keep up with demand, causing a slowdown in page load times, particularly on mobile. Native ads have started to become click bait. In my opinion, full-screen takeovers are one of the main drivers of annoyance – the same ads that have a unique selling point of higher engagement and click-through rate. Perhaps ad-blocking is the kick-starter we needed to re-evaluate our approach.
With TV and out-of-home, effectiveness is measured predominately on audience reach. Furthermore, you know that it will run on a screen or pre-determined location that has the opportunity to be seen. Digital, in some ways, was forced to hide in the background. Even though we are buying on impressions, opportunity to be seen has perhaps been overhauled by a focus on action. Today, a shift towards viewability is becoming more and more prominent. Depending on various sources, viewability benchmarks range anywhere from 40-60 per cent. These benchmarks would effectively render almost half of all ads in the Middle East unseen.
Adopting viewability standards is a great, and much needed, step in the evolution of the quality of measurement in digital. However, and more importantly, we need to learn from previous mistakes and think of the audience as people, not just numbers on a spreadsheet. We can just as easily achieve 100 per cent viewability as we did increasing CTR, by pushing adverts in places audiences do not want them to be.
There has been interesting research into the effects of viewable impressions and ad recall. Media Rating Council standards see lifts of 4 per cent, with 100 per cent in view seeing lifts of 11 per cent. However, much more interesting when looking at effectiveness is the impact of time-in-view – 4 seconds achieving 8 per cent, and 7 seconds achieving 17 per cent uplift. These insights are valuable for us to understand new ways to look at digital media beyond the impression and click, placing value on the quality of media and opportunity to see.
Interestingly, large premium publishers such as The Economist and Financial Times have started experimenting with new digital trading models, shifting from cost per thousand/viewable cost per thousand to cost per hour.
Technology is helping us start to bridge the offline and online worlds and get a deep understanding of our consumers and their passion points. Through data management platforms we can make sense of this in real-time and deliver customised messaging across our digital buys, making our ads relevant. We have the ability to measure how long our message has been seen. We are starting to be able to measure cross-device more accurately for unique reach. These are all factors I believe will be central to digital planning in the near future.
There is still a value to behavioural metrics; however, I believe they should be one part of the overall picture, not the total picture, especially for brand advertisers. User experience and attention should have a greater emphasis, playing a key role for the brand. Starting to shift towards time-in-view and understanding that digital can have an impact and capture attention without any action taken would be a real step forward for the industry. It is a brave shift but one I am keen on following closely to gain deeper insights into the true effects of digital, and that will enable us to shift back to the fundamentals of advertising – communicating a relevant message to our audience.
Scott Spurgeon, Senior digital manager at MEC MENA
