comScore releases study to highlight top 10 burning issues in digital

There are few burning issues in the ‘monetisability’ of the digital medium and its measurement. comScore points out the 10 most important issues, which are also the most difficult. The company has also pointed out that progress is being made on all fronts, but has said that the industry must continue to build on this progress.

Right from measurability to monetisability, comScore points out some issues, including Methbots, cross-platform measurement, viewability, pressure on CPMs and mobile monetisation, among other issues.

The report provides comScore’s perspective on the most pressing topics, issues and trends that are changing the way media buyers and sellers evaluate digital in the context of the broader media ecosystem. Here are the top 10 issues pointed out in the study:

1) Bridging the divide between TV and digital

Cross-platform convergence is our new reality as the lines continue to blur between traditional and digital media distribution and consumption. Differences in the way each medium has historically been measured demand better alignment to make cross-platform measurement usable in the marketplace. These differences are raising a host of questions as to the best ways to advertise on digital video: how effective is cutting down a 30-second TV spot to 15-seconds? Are digital video viewers more tolerant of 5-6 second spots? Do pre-roll or mid-roll ads work better? How can we have confidence these ads are even viewable?

Consistency and comparability in reporting metrics – such as reach, frequency, and demographics – are paramount, but TV and digital must also be based on the same opportunity-to-see (OTS) standard. At the centre of the divide sits digital video, which combines the sight-sound-and motion of TV with the targeting of digital.

If digital advertising ever hopes to level the playing field with TV, it’s going to need to clean up its supply chain.

2. Advanced audience data

Big data has been transforming the media industry for some time, but perhaps in no more significant way than in the growing application of advanced audience data. In digital, advanced audiences have been a part of the buying and selling of inventory for quite some time.

Now, with access to big data and technology, we are seeing a shift toward the same type of audience-based buying in TV and cross platform. TV networks, for example, are now making their inventory available for audience-based buys. OpenAP, a collaboration between Fox, Turner and Viacom, is a major industry initiative that promises to accelerate the use of advanced audience data for TV buys and has advertisers excited. comScore is an active measurement partner in this OpenAP initiative.

Advanced audience planning paves the way for advanced audiences to be used as a basis of transacting across all screens.

3. Monetising mobile

Mobile media has taken over for desktop as the primary digital engagement platform – now accounting for two thirds of digital media time spent – but publishers have found the medium much harder to monetise. Dollars appear to be flowing disproportionately to the largest platforms while the mid-and long-tail of publishers are left competing in what some argue amounts to a zero-sum market.

Underlying many of the monetisation issues are media fragmentation and measurement challenges unique to mobile. Greater standardisation around measurement implementation can help solve the fragmentation problems, a cause which the IAB has recently stepped in to try to address.

Aligning mobile with desktop through unduplicated measurement of campaign audiences also helps digital better demonstrate audience scale and provides planners with improved data for more efficient campaign planning.

4. Measuring unduplicated reach across platforms

The historical challenge in digital media measurement has been the deduplication of audiences across multiple media platforms. comScore’s introduction of Media Metrix Multi-Platform in 2012 solved this important challenge, ensuring that digital media companies could have their entire audiences represented to advertisers.

But digital media has continued to evolve across even more platforms as audiences diversify beyond their owned-and-operated content channels to distributed publishing platforms.

Measurement integrations with AMP, Apple News, Facebook Instant Articles, Flipboard and Google Play Newsstand have already been established, with more on the way.

Certain publishers are seeing that, in aggregate, traffic from these platforms can add an incremental 25-30 per cent to their unique audience in a given month.

Getting credit for these audiences is critical for publishers being able to demonstrate their full scale and articulate their value to advertisers.

5. Cross-device marketing

For years, it has been digital’s promise to help marketers reach the right consumer on the right platform at the right time – with the right message.

Never has this been more important than now, with so many different devices and ways to access content, and never has this promise been so close to becoming a reality, largely thanks to the emergence of the ‘device graph’.

But not all device graphs are created equal, because there’s significant variation in their underlying data sources and cross-device unification methods.

Critical questions must be asked to understand the quality of the device graph models: Does first-party data form the foundation of the device graph? How big are the data sets? What inputs inform the model? Are techniques probabilistic or deterministic? What data is used to validate these models? What intra-device capabilities exist to understand consumption across platforms and apps?

Getting answers to these important questions upfront will set marketers up for success as they build strategies to incorporate this type of person-level data into their businesses.

6. Programmatic pressure on CPMs

The early promise of programmatic advertising may now be catching up with reality. Marketers, once enamoured with reaching highly-targeted audiences at bargain-basement rates, are encountering unanticipated problems.

In some cases, they are over-targeting consumers at the expense of the broader reach needed to grow their brands. In other cases, they find that low-priced inventory tends to come with more quality-control issues, like running on low quality sites or against invalid traffic (IVT). Publishers, meanwhile, are realising that chasing extra dollars by offloading inventory at too low a rate is contributing to overall pricing pressure on the valuable premium inventory that drives the lion’s share of their ad revenue.

The winds are beginning to blow back in the direction of media quality, as marketers show a willingness to put a premium back on being seen in a well-lit, quality environment.

comScore conducted research in 2016 showing that premium publishers drive an average of 67 per cent higher branding effectiveness.

7. Moving beyond viewability

Viewability allows us to know if an ad can have an impact and should be seen as table-stakes for any campaign measurement.

Digital ad viewability first emerged as an important issue in 2011, and years later many in the industry are still grappling with its implications. While there has been greater standardisation around transacting on viewable impressions, there remains too strong a focus on the single metric of viewability, often incorrectly using it as an effectiveness metric rather than as a diagnostic for managing inventory quality.

It is the beginning, not the end, of the conversation. With digital ads, less focus should be placed on whether the ad is viewable and more focus should be placed on the quality of the ad unit, the ad creative, the audience it reaches, and the context in which it is seen.

The fundamentals of advertising delivery – reach, frequency, GRPs and demographics – remain as relevant today as ever.

8. Filtering big botnets

Continued accounts of large botnets – like Methbot which drew headlines in late 2016 – have caused concern among advertisers and publishers alike. As they threaten to proliferate and escape accountability from some verification providers, they erode trust in the entire digital advertising ecosystem.

Advertisers waste their budgets while publishers look worse for failing to deliver legitimate advertising. This issue is a significant one that is only becoming even more pervasive.

While Methbot garnered a lot of media attention last year, it was not unique, unfortunately, in terms of its scale and impact. In fact, Methbot drove just 0.86 per cent of global IVT filtered by comScore the day before it was unmasked.

From May to July 2017, SIVT of this nature accounted for 90 per cent of US IVT. Undoubtedly, IVT is a problem across all of digital, but it gets worse for high-value inventory because fraudsters tend to chase high CPMs. Video inventory has become a magnet for IVT with rates running nearly twice as high as display inventory and growing at a much faster rate. Such high levels of video IVT not only diminish trust in digital but they also undermine the ability to compare against TV.

9. The value of attention

Of late, premium publishers want to not only place more value on “attention” or time spent with the content but also begin transacting on that basis.

There is some rationale in this argument because CPMs should ideally reflect advertising effectiveness, and more time in-view increases the opportunity for ads to have an impact.

Use of attention metrics also advances the discussion beyond viewability toward metrics that may correlate better with actual effectiveness.

But changing the basis for transactions is easier said than done and requires a lot of cross-industry coordination. The media industry has been predicated on impression-based currency since its early days, and even the transition from one impression-based currency (gross served impressions) to the more relevant impression-based currency (viewable impressions) has taken more than five years and is still not fully aligned. Attention metrics can and should become a consideration in the valuation of inventory.

Marketers who only seek out impressions or clicks at the lowest CPM open themselves up to poor-quality impressions, low engagement sites, and potentially non-brand safe environments.

10. Advertising attribution

Being able to accurately identify the value of the various elements in a marketing plan is an increasingly important component of campaign effectiveness measurement. However, many still rely on simplistic approaches, such as first-click or last click attribution, even though more sophisticated methods are now available.

Impression-level advertising measurement across media platforms combined with descriptive data that’s tied to outcome metrics provides rich information for analysis.

Cross-platform campaign measurement can help determine which channels are most effective. Descriptive impression-level data such as placement type, ad format, creative, media placement and demographic reached provides more avenues for analysis to figure out which variables are working. Diagnostic metrics like viewability and invalid traffic help filter out the effects of ads that can’t drive any impact. And finally, the ability to link impressions to outcomes – whether that’s a lift in attitudinal metrics, behaviour, in-store sales or other dependent variables – quantifies the magnitude of the advertising effects.

Taken together, this data can illuminate what’s working so that marketers can allocate their budgets more efficiently. They can optimize media buys to increase effectiveness, get detailed feedback on campaign performance and adjust strategies to drive greater ROI.

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