Brian O’Kelley, AppNexus CEO, has established himself as one of the biggest names in the programmatic advertising sector, having first helped establish Right Media Exchange, and continuing his career after its $850m sale to Yahoo, with the founding of his current outfit.

In the first of a two-part interview, O'Kelley shares with ExchangeWire just some of his views on AppNexus’ recent product launches, as well as how the industry can move cohesively to tackle some of its biggest issues, beginning with the issue of viewability.

AppNexus recently announced the purchase of Alenty to improve ad viewability on its platform, can you explain how crucial an issue ad viewability is if programmatic advertising is to improve its reputation for accountability?

The issue is obviously crucial, at the core of the purchase of Alenty, was the conviction that viewability measurement is crucial, and measurement is the key word there, it’s not just about only buying viewable impressions.

For instance, in other media like TV, there’s no guarantee that you’re going to have someone staring at the screen. But what you do need to have is a confidence that there is a high likelihood that someone is going to see the ads. And with the purchase of Alenty, we like to think that we’re helping to [further] shine a light on whether or not these ads are going to be seen.

What made Alenty stand out from other companies offering similar services?
I first met Laurent [Nicolas, Alenty co-founder] at Dmexco a few years ago and what he said to me that made me take notice was that he wanted to see how viewability as a signal – or measurement – helps us improve conversion performance, and that’s a very different take on viewability.

It makes intuitive sense that people that don’t see an ad aren’t likely to convert based on them. So we asked them [Alenty] if there was a creative way for us to use their technology on our platform, and so they built an app on our platform [dating back to 2011], so they started playing with the possible combinations of our technologies.

This helped us realise how important viewability measurement was becoming. It was important to see how it could become a powerful lever for our optimisation and personalisation capabilities, that plus the growing importance of viewability among advertisers and marketers.

Ultimately, the partnership is about effectiveness, and not viewability per se.

How long have the two companies been looking at this transaction?
About six months ago – give or take – there was an idea that this is something we should do. We’ve spoken about and looked at just about every other company in this space. But with just about every test we performed, or looked at, Alenty performed extraordinarily well. So we think that we’re going to be able to develop even more great technologies in the years to come.

How will the two teams integrate further? For instance, will the Alenty brand remain?
Right now, we don’t know [about the Alenty brand], there’s a lot of logistics we’re still working out, but we’ll definitely pull their technology into our AppNexus platform within the next few weeks.

There’s lots of exciting things to come.

What about ad viewability on mobile and video, these are two issues that have yet to be agreed upon by relevant trade bodies?
Advertising has forever been plagued about the issue of measuring effectiveness, because what you’re ultimately trying to do is judge the process of wires inside our brains. So what we’re trying to do is measure a proxy for impact.

'Viewable' is a bit of a misnomer, because if an ad is ‘viewable’ [under the terms of the recent IAB metrics], well it doesn’t necessarily mean it was seen by a human being. I think that’s why we’ve got a lot of companies with different standards out there.

What we’re [the entire industry] trying to work out is how long do you have to see an ad, for it to be effective. For instance, do you have to be looking at a screen for an ad [which may, or may not have video and audio content] for it to be effective.

I think what we need in this instance is a ‘good enough’ standard, that can tell you in most cases, reasonably accurately if an ad was in the viewable area of a browser in a way that a message could be received.

I know that mightn’t seem like a great stretch, but we [in the digital media industry] often seem in a hurry to miss the opportunity for ‘good enough’, and go for ‘perfect’ instead.

I think the Alenty technology is certainly good enough, and that in a few years time, we’ll see the industry come together and hone-in on one or two, maybe three, technologies that meet that threshold.

What about viewability issues on mobile specifically?
The Alenty team has been working on mobile for years, one of the things we liked most about the platform was its ability to work across devices. Plus they recently conducted some interesting research about viewability on video specifically too, which is something we’ll be presenting to the market in a couple of weeks.

What kind of issues has Alenty been looking at with this research?
I don’t know exactly as we’ve only owned this company for a couple of days now and I haven’t seen it personally, but there is a plan in place to present it within a couple of weeks.

ExchangeWire will tomorrow publish the second part of the interview with O'Kelley, where he answers questions from ExchangeWire readers on their thoughts on its recent product launches, including AppNexus Pulse, and Twixt.