As viewability moves squarely into the frame as an industry topic, specialist advertising technology provider, Inskin Media, weighs in on the debate. Inskin chief executive, Hugo Drayton (pictured below), said viewability has evolved into a key metric for the industry, and InSkin has led the research into how viewability should be measured and valued. However, according to Drayton, viewability is only a starting point. “Viewability is a valuable ad validation method but it was never designed to tell us anything about effectiveness,” he cautioned. “Be aware of viewability’s limitation, and always assess it in context. “Optimising against viewability rates without taking the placement and campaign context into account can be very misleading and actually be counter-productive to achieving campaign goals.” Drayton said the visual and mental engagement that brands achieve with their executions are much more important. InSkin Media’s research demonstrates the effectiveness of a high-impact but non-intrusive approach to delivering advertiser messages, he said. “Rich-media, non-standard formats are much more complex to measure, compared to standard formats – and industry vendors struggled for some time to address those complexities,” he said. “However, as viewability has evolved into a key metric, vendors such as Moat now include Rich Media formats. “Since the migration of brand advertising budgets to digital environments is a major trend, the effective measurement of non-standard formats is ever more critical.” Despite digital disruption being rife, even within digital itself, Drayton downplays native advertising and ad blockers’ rising popularity replacing traditional display ads. “In recent times, despite the industry’s concern with Ad Blocking and its focus on ‘Native’ advertising, the online display sector is in rude good health, with impressive growth,” he said. “The barriers between different types of advertising such as video, native, and display are reducing. “However, I do not think we are witnessing the death of display,” he said.
Although viewability rates are valuable for ad validation, on their own they cannot account for the visual and mental engagements advertisers achieve with audiences, which are more important, according to the CEO of InSkin Media, Hugo Drayton. He added, however, that despite concerns over ad-blocking, online display advertising is “in good health” and seeing significant growth.