Making Viewing Figures Accurate and Precise
In a recent article on MediaPost, Wayne Friedman talks about the difficulties of measuring online video viewers.
Measuring any aspect of a network as enormous and complex as the Internet is always going to be a challenge. Things which appear to be obvious are not always what they seem. Take Web pages, for example. Many people think of them as always-available electronic pages of information that are simply transferred to a Web browser for viewing. Unfortunately, Web sites may not always be available (for a number of reasons ranging from failing servers to network congestion), and many Web pages are dynamically created from underlying databases – so, they could be argued to having only a transitory existence. That ‘page’ of information could actually be the result of a search in a database that vanishes once the window is closed, never to be seen in that form ever again.
Measurements have two key indicators for validity: accuracy and precision. Accuracy indicates how close the measurement is to the true value. Precision indicates if the measurement is repeatable. One measurement is not enough – you need several results with a similar value before you can call it a valid measurement. So, what is happening when there are different numbers published for the viewers of a Web site?
The variability and unpredictability of human beings gives a lot of scope for variation in addition to the availability of the Web site or page. Just a few examples include: how long does a viewer have to stay on a site for it to count as a view? Does the window containing the page have to be visible on the screen for it to be counted as a ‘view’? Suppose that they click away after a few seconds, then return later – is that one viewer or two? What if they view the site with two different browsers or on two different pieces of hardware (moving from smart-phone to computer, for example) – is that two viewers? What about those potential viewers who seem to spend more time waiting for videos to buffer and play than they do actually watching them?
Current technology allows us to almost instantly and effortlessly do things online that used to require dedicated hardware and processes, so there can be many sources of measurements for online viewers. But the inherent flexibility could be the solution itself – by standardizing around one technique, but having several sources analyze and interpret the data. Initially, there may be variations in the numbers, but the flexibility should allow rapid convergence to a similar result. This replaces volatility with validity. All we need now is the right mix of experts in the applicable disciplines – advertising, networks, human behaviour, browsers – to define that standard.
Tags: Measurement, Standards, Technology
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Quest for the Standard
Earlier this year, a joint venture, called The Pool, was led by Publicis companies Starcom MediaVest Group and VivaKi, and including Hulu, Microsoft and Yahoo, to test and establish standards for new advertising models among the ad elite.
The Pool wants to narrow the current vast selection for video to one golden standard, which they will present in February 2010. Last week, two executives, Curt Hecht, president of VivaKi Nerve Center, and Tracey Scheppach, video innovation director at Starcom USA, presented the audience at IAB’s Digital Video conference the timeline for their testing. They’ve reduced their initial like of 30 possible online video ad units to two, which they will be testing (against the pre-roll format) until October of this year.
While they didn’t go into much more detail, it’s certainly an interesting prospect – one online video format that achieves the most engagement from consumers while achieving what’s most appealing to media buyers. Could such a thing exist?
IAB has taken their own group of advisors, calling The Re-Imagining Interactive Advertising Task Force (what a name!), which includes more than 20 publishers and agencies like CBS Interactive, Digitas, Google, Razorfish and Universal McCann. For the first time, this group will help to recommend changes to IAB’s annual review of ad standards. This is part of the IAB’s ongoing push to create better guidelines for advertisers. It seems that lack of standardization in online advertising is everyone’s problem, but these efforts are a big incentive to brands who are hesitant to invest in the space.
Meanwhile, media companies are doing their best to get creative about selling video ads. NBC has started pitching variations of their usual ad units, offering a “push back” roll-over unit under the video window and longer single pre-roll ads.
Whatever the end results from these two groups are, there’s sure to be a dramatic shift for content owners. Perhaps content owners can save money by repurposing the “old standard,” pre-roll ads, into refreshed and retargeted personalized video? It’s worth testing the waters.
Tags: Creative, IAB, Publicis, Standards
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