Measurement Needs an Upgrade
The whole industry is in transition, we are moving from third party cookies to privacy preserving technologies, nowhere is this truer than in measurement, arguably the most important area of online advertising. Alongside big ecosystem changes we’re beginning to see a fundamental change in the unit of measurement for campaigns, from impressions to something much more meaningful, impressions that are seen, this can really be viewed as the third major change in the unit of measurement of campaigns since digital advertising was first popularised in the mid 1990s.
Impressions 1994 -2012
In the early days of digital advertising media buys were negotiated by a planner buyer, trafficked by someone in Ad Operations & the unit of delivery was the humble impression. Pricing was fixed so measuring the booking was delivered using impressions was simple. Of course fixed priced static bookings came to an end when programmatic buying was first popularised in 2011, but the unit of measurement remained the same for a couple of years in the absence of more sophisticated options.
Viewable Impressions 2012 - 2020
As programmatic became the infrastructure for delivering online advertising campaigns & the number of impressions available to purchase on a site through a given site proliferated, buyers realised that they needed a better way of deciding which impressions to buy on a given domain.
Businesses like Integral Ad Science & Double Verify created tools that allow buyers to understand when a particular ad was in view, buyers quickly began to use the percentage of impressions on a site that were viewable as a qualitative metric for their brand campaigns. This of course was a big step in the right direction.
Attentive Impressions 2021 - Present
Whilst measuring something that is viewable is a massive step on from just measuring impressions, recently there has been an acceptance that just because something is viewable doesn’t always mean it was viewed.
Over the past two years buyers have increasingly focussed on attention, which is measured using technology from companies such as Lumen. They’re eye tracking technology has shown that only 30% of online advertising is actually seen, but by targeting the right advertising space using predictive models brands can improve ROAS by as much as 10X.
We founded Impact Media with the belief that it is only the impressions that are seen that make the difference, we exclusively focus on buying these impressions in quality environments for our clients. Not only do we focus exclusively on quality impressions that are seen, unlike other businesses that still use first generation measures (impressions) as the basis for charging their customers, Impact only charges for impressions that a third party deems as seen, we call this an attentive CPM, or aCPM for short.
If this sounds like a better way of buying campaigns, please reach out to us here, we would love to chat.
