When Spending Digital Ad Budgets, Brands Face An Uphill Battle

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in programmatic TV and video.

Today’s column is written by Stephen Upstone, CEO and founder of LoopMe.

Brand marketers hire media agencies to streamline the advertising process, remove barriers and deliver clear and measurable ROI. The recent news that Google has lost MRC-accredited status and the controversy over Facebook’s measurement methodology suggest digital is not delivering on this promise.

As an industry, digital is maybe the worst culprit for creating an impenetrable environment, full of acronyms, viewability issues and performance analytics that are impossible for time-poor marketers to understand.

It doesn’t need to be this way. There’s no reason we can’t make digital clear, understandable and transparent across the board. That includes verification and the use of metrics and KPIs that help brands truly measure performance, particularly as newer formats gain popularity, such as video and virtual reality.

Third-party tracking for viewability and brand safety should always be in place. No matter how big or small, ad tech providers should be able to give evidence that their campaign delivered in view, in brand-safe environments, to human traffic.

Roughly 53% of campaigns are not viewable, despite the topic being at the top of conference agendas for at least two years. Only now after its recent measurement controversy is Facebook providing third-party viewability data for display campaigns, but it still won’t allow buyers to use their own trackers.

Advances do still need to be made in technology. If VPAID video ad inventory remains limited on the mobile web, viewability will remain difficult to track. However, that is no reason for the industry to be slow on the uptake when it comes to verification. If brands do not receive clear information on who saw their ads and where, they will continue to be distrustful of the industry.

Brand also need better metrics and KPIs that can be delivered on. Today, they are forced to use CPT (cost per thousand), CPV (cost per view), CPCV (cost per completed view), VCR (video completion rate), VCPM (viewable cost per thousand), CTR (click-through rate), ER (engagement rate) – the list goes on. Not only are the acronyms problematic, how do these metrics relate to brand goals, such as sales? They often don’t – there is virtually no link between CTR and sales, according to Nielsen.

Even if one digital metric is used – say video completion rate – it is not always easy to judge a campaign’s performance across formats or providers. A 30% completion rate for a skippable native format should be considered a good result, while a 60% completion rate for a non-skip pre-roll is a poor one.

It’s an issue Snapchat influencers are facing following the removal of autoplay content – view counts have substantially dropped since users were given the choice to view or skip video content, making campaigns appear less successful than they were a month ago. When scanning results, it’s easy to miss subtle distinctions, which could mean a perceived successful campaign actually underperformed, or vice versa.

Rather than requiring brands to master dozens of complex metrics, why don’t ad tech providers and publishers speak the brands’ language? Advertising campaigns are commissioned to affect brand metrics or drive purchase intent, awareness or product recall. At the end of a campaign, it should be clear that the ad drove a 40% increase in purchase intent or footfall in-store, with the number of clicks or views becoming – while interesting – largely irrelevant.

In today’s always-on mobile age, digital advertising is a hugely important part of the marketing mix. If the industry commits to transparency and streamlines the advertising process, it will be far easier for brands to understand and embrace the worth of digital advertising.

Follow LoopMe (@LoopMe) and AdExchanger (@adexchanger) on Twitter.

This post was syndicated from Ad Exchanger.