AUSTIN — If you believe some of the shocking stats over the last 18 months, close to half of online ads sold may not even technically be able to be viewed by human users.

Since then, industry bodies have taken great strides to iron out the problem, whilst ad tech vendors are selling ad buyers on “viewability” solutions.

GroupM Interaction north America CEO John Montgomery tells Beet.TV, in this video interview, that negative headlines about “the two ugly sisters of the trust and supply chain – viewability and fraud” – have been “apocryphal and mostly based and self-interest … it’s confused marketers a hell of a lot”.

“But, in truth we’ve seen viewable ads increase by nearly 30% year-on-year. Other agencies I speak to have seen the same thing. Web designers are redesigning their pages to make them much more viewable. Marketers are responding by paying premium rates for more viewable ads. So there’s a huge good news story to be told.”

In addition to “viewable” metrics having been laid down by industry bodies, the ANA, IAB and 4As have jointly formed The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), an effort to clean things up further.

Montgomery was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology.  Please find more coverage from the conference here.