Viewability vs. Business Objectives
Brand Safety and Viewability have been hot industry topics over the last few years and have now become engrained in campaign strategy – which is great news.
This month we’ll be exploring these in depth and how they can impact your business’ success.
Viewability might be a new term to you if you haven’t run Display media before. It originates from the term “viewable” which the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) defined as being at least 50% in view for the user for a duration of 3 seconds or more. Viewability then is the overarching term for all of your ads. It is scored as a percentage using the formula: Total measurable impressions/viewable impressions.
An example of this can be seen below:
High Viewability
Low Viewability
Poor viewability can essentially mean that the ads you buy and place are not actually being seen by their intended recipients. This means that the impact your ads are trying to get for you cannot happen as people literally aren’t seeing them. Often, cheaper inventory has lower viewability meaning that buying for high viewability can mean less overall impressions. Given a key element of your advertising campaigns should be generating awareness of your business, getting less impressions at a higher cost can sound inefficient.
They key here is having the skills and technology to balance a viewability which still creates the impact we need to build your brand whilst also being able to buy media at efficient prices at scale. Balance is paramount.
Brand safety is another interesting variable to consider. Brand safety is the term which describes what kind of website content you want your business to appear next to. We find that most businesses have a cut off point morally where they would be OK with their brand appearing.
The reason this is a topic for discussion is because limiting what content we place ads on can have implications on the people that see them and the cost of doing so. A good example here could be the difference between showing ads on a high quality piece of content that contains political views. If we are conscious of appearing politically affiliated then we would need to exclude content with political bias.
In contrast, we might be concerned with mature content (in most cases this is swearing/cursing) and need to exclude that. The ramifications of these could be that we lose out on high quality news websites reporting on political matters or prominent viral websites with huge site visitors and a great audience.
Ultimately this is a decision for you to make but you need this information in order to effectively make it as again, there is a balance to be achieved between campaign effectiveness and brand equity or appearance.
At Petram Digital, as a minimum to all of our campaigns we apply two layers of brand safety protection. The first is excluding any mature content and unclassified inventory. The second is a 13- point content exclusion including but not limited to violence, death, tragedy, drugs and gambling.