Suddenly, whether an ad impression was viewable on-screen is table stakes.

In the new world, the emerging medium of over-the-top TV is going to need to convince marketers that their ad was truly effective.

That’s the view of one ad agency leader charged with plotting the course to the OTT future.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Mike Fisher, Essence VP of Advanced TV & Audio, says he welcomes ad verification providers branching out into ad measurement.

Finding effectiveness

Fisher says brands have some worries about how their OTT ad money is really being spent, and whether it is really effective.

“With that comes client concern, and really the need to understand more from a third-party perspective, where these ads are running, how they’re reaching their viewer and ensure that they’re being delivered on target,” he says.

“The premium publishers, who have a lot of skin in the game and want to continue to drive substantial tier-one marketing budgets through their platforms, they’re trustworthy.

“The questions that marketers have (are) more around the longer-tail publishers, the aggregators, the programmatic buying pipes. They want to make sure that they’re upholding those buying channels and modalities to the same standard that they’re holding the premium television networks do – knowing what type of content it’s running in, making sure it’s brand safe, making sure it’s viewable and measurable.”

Plugging the gap

But Fisher sees a role emerging for ad verification software providers. They have typically been focused on simply establishing whether an ad impression was viable – in other words, whether it was viewable by a real human.

“Move on beyond just validating that the impressions were delivered to a human,” Fisher says.

“The third-party ad verification platforms have an opportunity to step in and be that trusted validation partner – not just for the advertiser and agency, but for those tier-two tier-three publishers and tier-one programmatic buying pipes.”

Fisher hopes that will plug a “gap” he sees in OTT ad sales. He says TV buyers are still trying to use traditional metrics.

This video is part of CTV Grows Up: Making a New Medium More Efficient & Effective, a Beet.TV series presented by DoubleVerify. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

By Robert Andrews on @robertandrews