Viewability vs Engagement: Advertising’s New Measure Of Accountability

Viewability has always been a standard of the advertising world. In this digital era, Engagement must become our new measure of success. Moving past who ‘sees’ and focusing on who actually interacts with your brand.

Viewability has always been a standard of the advertising world. Who is going to see the ad? How many people will see the ad? ‘See’ being the main objective. When digital heralded a new age of measurability and, we thought, accountability, there again was viewability as the central concern for the majority of advertisers.

Yet in the last ten years we have found ourselves in a conundrum, technology is irreversibly changing the way in which we consume content and communicate. As people grow increasingly immune to what they ‘see’, advertisers come up with disease-like terms such as ‘banner blindness’, perhaps in an ill-devised hope that we can ‘cure’ behaviour.

Even if audiences see digital ads, and give them their full attention (now we are talking ‘big IF’), the effect is very different to the effect traditional mediums like print and TV have on passive ready-made viewers. For the most part, people think digital advertising is annoying, not because it isn’t creative or even relevant, but because it is forced upon us in online environments which we intrinsically associate with ‘choice’ (a mere 16% watch to the end of a mobile video ad according to the MMA).

Instead of addressing consumer behaviour in new media, the industry is ‘solving’ the problem by coming up with ever more confusing definitions for viewability, to justify ad spend. When is an ad ‘viewable’? What does it mean to ‘view’ an ad? Facebook deem an autoplayed video ad seen for 3 seconds as a view and charge accordingly.  Is this really money well spent?

But there is some glimmer of hope. Forward looking brands are starting to understand that there is a big difference between disliking online ads and disliking the brand. Users don’t dislike brands, they just hate being talked at, interrupted and forced to ‘see’. They want to be given a choice, to be part of the conversation. We are slowly moving away from communicating to people one way, and beginning to connect with consumers. The new measure of success is engagement.

Today’s teenagers make up the first generation that was born holding a touch-screen super computer, aka a smartphone. Generation Z is quite the opposite of stone-faced zombies, they are the kids growing up hyperconnected, empowered, incredibly engaged and, most importantly, marketing-literate. If brands want to remain relevant in the future, they must start measuring their success with metrics that make sense and mean something.

This approach removes all doubt around accountability. Engagement commands a premium but a well-justified one. Advertisers would be sure that, not only has their brand been seen but more significantlyinteracted with, and in the case of smartphones and tablets know that people have physically touchedtheir brand. Furthermore, it would be in publishers best interests to ensure the ad placements are hyper-targeted and relevant so as to maximize conversion from ‘views’ to engagement and minimize inventory required.

Engagement should be our new objective. A passing glance should no longer be enough. We must push ourselves to have consumers interact, touch, feel, feedback, converse, enjoy and ultimately connect at a deep level. As technology advances into new mediums – smarter mobile, wearables, the internet of things, augmented reality, virtual reality – the economy of choice will further cement itself. Brands that acknowledge this now will be those we will all be aspiring to emulate in the next ten years.

This article was first published in Brand Quarterly (22.Jul.2015).