Through initiatives like the Media Ratings Council defining what truly constitutes a “viewable” ad, the industry has come a long way to eradicating fraudulent practices.
But the spectrum of viewable ad-measuring platforms spawned by the search for accuracy means video ad sales are still in a pickle, says one video ad tech boss.
“There’s a lack of standardization in terms of what’s viewable… the industry is in a mess right now,” according to Irfon Watkins, CEO of Coull, a Bristol, UK-based company whose technology mines the content of videos, indexing them for ad targetability.
“Each third-party vendor has put a different algorithm in to it. If you do a peer review IAS against Moat against Peer 39, they’ll all come up with different results.”
Previously, Randall Rothenberg, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) president has complained to Beet.TV about a similar problem: “There are 17 accredited viewability vendors in the field and at least a dozen more in the pipeline to be accredited by the MRC. This proliferation of vendors has been an utter obstacle, they’ve just confused everybody.”
Watkins says “the only way to solve theatre trust problem is to bring more technology to it”.
