Ritson: “Apparently, an exposure of less than two seconds of partial video on a smartphone still represents amazing value for money. I continue to despair at the state of modern marketing.”
By Mark Ritson
Adjunct Professor of Marketing at Melbourne Business School
Much has been written over the past few years about the “walled gardens” that both Facebook and Google have built around their data.
Unlike other media that use independent organisations to measure their audiences, the digital duopoly “marks its own homework”, to use Sir Martin Sorrell’s famous phrase.
Facebook and Google claim this approach protects both the personal data of their users and their own competitive advantage. But critics claim measuring your own performance leaves these two companies open to errors and accusations of non-transparency and overstatement.
To its credit, Facebook has recently lowered the walls around its garden to a significant degree. Third-party viewability verification is now widely offered to advertisers to reassure them they are getting what they pay for. This more transparent approach to measurement has been embraced by clients and media agencies.
The downside, however, is that these raw metrics are starting to spook some advertisers because they appear to suggest that viewability of Facebook ads is significantly lower than many anticipated.
1 Comment
Imagine being drunk, being asked by the copper “are you drunk?” , responding “no” and then showing them a piece of paper that says “not drunk” and walking away from the situation unchanged.
That’s what Facebook did with the IAS. “Here’s cherry picked data for you to verify”.
They need to actually give access to MRC and finalize a standard across the board on what counts as a view, a click, an impression, etc.