Recent headlines have purported that ad viewability in the UK is now less than 50%. As human beings, we're programmed to strive towards achieving the best we can and many marketers will struggle to accept a performance metric of 50%. Especially when that 50% is measurable and trackable and, therefore, someone should be held accountable, right? Wrong. TubeMogul's UK Managing Director, Nick Reid, speaks exclusively to ExchangeWire and explains why, when it comes to viewability, 100% does not equal perfect. 

As a father, I have noticed a recent trend where articles appear in my inbox and social media news feeds discussing the trouble with helicopter parenting. You’ve seen the stories – tales of parents who want to ban all seeds from an entire town because their precious tot once had a slight reaction, or (my favourite) when university professors find mum and dad camped out in their office to debate their child’s grade.

These humorous stories make the rounds as we point fingers at the people wrapping their child in cotton wool. We then make comments that the kid will never be able to handle the real world once they leave their protective cocoon.

However, the reality is that we are doing the very same thing in the world of ad tech.

Every day, we are facing increasing demands for 100% viewability rates and companies are launching in the sector promising this elusive achievement. As the parents of our brand campaign, it feels good knowing that we are protecting our online video children from the big bad wolf of poor viewability. The truth is that the companies promising 100% viewability are just like the helicopter parents we laugh at – they are protecting marketers from the truth in order to make them feel comfortable with the numbers.

In advertising, one very predictable reality is that people are going to ignore your ad. For example, they might tab away while your video is playing, or leave the room during the 30-second ad break that is interrupting their online experience. They might not even see the ad because it is autoplaying in a corner of the screen on a small player that your eye is avoiding. All of this is natural human behaviour – and yet each of these ads are considered 100% viewable, according to today’s definition of the term. You could choose to pay double the price in order to ignore the reality – the question is what you should really be doing about it.

Paying for 100% guaranteed viewability will – most likely – increase underlying cost. Buying with a guarantee is comforting to the helicopter parent in you, but often buying without a guarantee through self-serve software yields a lower viewable CPM, which is the metric that matters here. The key is in partnering with a buying software that is open about cost, provides site-level transparency and either built-in or third-party viewability measurements. If you don't have that, then there is no way you will ever know if you are getting ripped off.

Buying 100% viewability also harkens back to a pre-programmatic era, raft with ad network-style bundling, guarantees, blind markups, and manual selling. This undercuts the self-serve reality of programmatic advertising, where an advertiser is in full control of every variable through real-time software and makes their own tradeoffs.

To be fair, we should acknowledge that there are some advertisers for whom guarantees make sense. However, the majority who have embraced programmatic's benefits should ask some tough questions to those promising 100% viewability.

Allowing your children to leave the nest and try and make it on their own is one of the most difficult things a parent can do. The same goes for a brand campaign. It’s time to remove the 100% viewability buffer and focus on the things that matter – lowering cost, reaching viewers and having the ability to control your campaign based on brand lift and not a misleading statistic.