The only age group that spends a lot of time watching TV is 50 years and above. That’s a bit worrying. India is going through a transformation with 300 million smartphones where people decide what they want to watch, where they want to watch and how they want to watch. It’s critical that we ask questions about measuring this audience. It is critical that we put TV and digital together. It’s not either or.
The challenge with digital is that we have foundational and structural challenges. It’s like you can see the billboard which is facing the other direction when you are driving down the highway. Just because the ad was viewable, is it effective? That’s the problem with the digital medium. Imagine, if you were watching television and ads started showing up on the side of the screen. What would happen? How can you measure exposure when you are just one among ten things on the screen? Does that equate to exposure? Or do we need to rethink on how we define an exposure. This is the problem with digital where there are multiple ads competing for attention in the same screen.
The scarce resource that every consumer has is attention. Every marketer wants positive consumer attention, repeat, positive consumer attention. All media channels sell the ability to reach people who are willing to pay attention. That is the currency that’s at play here.
And attention does not mean noticing. As friends at Microsoft have pointed out, transient attention has gone down from 12 seconds to 8 seconds in 15 years. We start with the foundation. It’s not just about CPT (cost per thousand) viewers but about CPVT (cost per viewable thousand).
We need to know that at least someone had the chance to see the ad. If you walked past Times Square in New York City in the US, you can actually see the billboard that you have taken. I welcome the trade associations in the US — it has taken them five years to make that work — where not-for profit groups, that are not buyers or sellers of media, but those who represent both sides, get together to focus on viewability. When you see agreement at such a high level that’s the right direction to move in. What is viewability — it’s the ability to see an ad.
Who saw my ad? We need to ask, what is the right metrics to measure whether an ad was actually there and separately metrics to measure if the ad was actually successful. In the US, agencies like Group M have created their own definitions of what viewability means to them.
A couple of other media services groups are also going to announce their own versions. That might not be the right way to go. Only half of the money spent on ads is viewable, the other half has zero viewability. In mobile, less than 50 per cent of the ads are viewable. Leading digital media companies like Google in the US started off as being against viewability but actually ended up going completely in the other direction. Now viewability is part of their selling strategy, it’s part of their package.
Measurement is an area where we will need to be precise. This has to be done by a third party and not by someone who is selling you the media.
Guess what the answer is when you are selling the media? It invariably is to spend more money. As we say in the US, the elephant in the room is that half of the ads in the Internet are not viewable. We also have the big issue of Bots where people generate fake web pages and fake advertising inventory. It’s not great for anyone who pays for or produces high quality content. This is the problem that we have to address and we have to address this together, cohesively. Viewability is the base or foundation from which we have to get to effectiveness to optimal attention. Otherwise we are going to optimise to the wrong signals. If we want to create a sustainable ecosystem to get the consumer experience right, it’s not just a publisher’s problem but also an advertiser problem. In my opinion, advertisers have been quite complacent on this front.
How do we measure attention? If we stand outside a retail store in a mall, we can ask this question — how many people walk by the store? How many people walk into the store? How much time do they spend once they are inside? What do they do? Are they passive, interactive, did they ultimately buy anything? In digital, the same set of questions apply to start to get to a better place.