Digital Media Quality: If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it
Management thinker Peter Drucker is often quoted as saying, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” This means that you can not know whether you are meeting your goals or optimising effectively unless success is defined and tracked. This is true for most of the things in life, including digital ad spend. According to eMarketer data, digital ad spend in India is slated to grow from $2.77 billion in 2021 to $3.41 billion in 2022. Increasingly accessible internet connections at lower prices, along with ubiquitous and affordable mobile devices and plans in India are helping another billion users join the internet by 2025 according to Google’s next billion users data. Digital is fast-tracking how we live, work, and play.
As these consumers shift their attention to digital platforms, marketing budgets are following. Digital advertising allows marketers to target consumers more precisely with more personalised, relevant information, in real-time, on multiple devices, and on the go. Digital advertising’s highly personalised nature should make it more relevant to audiences, but brand risks, supply path murkiness, privacy concerns, and ad fraud, are creating barriers. Advertisers want more transparency into and advice about how to target customers online after the deprecation of cookies; manage data privacy challenges; increase ad campaign efficiencies; measure engagement, better control where their brands show up; protect their ad spend on evolving mediums, and more.
Programmatic Advertising Growth Drives New Need for Transparency and Efficiency
Programmatic advertising in India has skyrocketed and it’s expected to continue to grow. According to the Digital Advertising in India 2020 Dentsu Aegis report, programmatic will account for 74% of ad spending, while direct deals will decline to 26% in 2022.
Programmatic advertising offers a smarter, faster alternative to manual digital advertising. Before programmatic advertising, ordering, setting up, and reporting on ads all had to be carried out physically.
Alongside these obvious advantages, programmatic advertising does bring the challenge of transparency in the supply path. P&G’s Marc Pritchard has famously said that the digital media supply chain can be “murky at best and fraudulent at worst.” Building trust and transparency around digital advertising is of paramount importance.
As an industry, we continue to strive for a more transparent, fair, and efficient means of conducting business at scale. With each new innovation, we get another step closer to restoring trust in the ecosystem. Through transparency, we can address recurring inefficiencies and bad actors across the supply chain and further support programs like Ads.txt.
Ad Verification Creates Value for Advertisers
Today’s agile marketers are constantly optimising their media spends and making sure that their ad campaigns are making the necessary connections and providing ROI. They are striving to make every impression count by controlling the quality of the media they buy or bid on. Ad verification is a technology process that allows advertisers to check whether their ads are seen by real people, in the right geography, and in safe and suitable environments. To do this, ad verification firms deploy tags or beacons with an ad that analyse ad placement, performance, context, and more. To avoid their brand getting unintentionally and unknowingly being exposed to risky placements, marketers, publishers, and platforms have turned to ad verification technology to help mitigate the risk associated with digital advertising.
Here are a few suggestions to set up your verification campaign for overall success when you work with a digital media quality company:
- Set a viewability standard according to the company guidelines: If you are unsure where to start a good place is using the IAB industry-standard, secondly, you can look to move to lift viewability in line with the country’s performance or similar to how others are performing in your vertical. It is also worth noting that your agency might have a standard in place as well.
- Establish your brand safety and suitability strategy: what categories or keyword terms are acceptable or unacceptable to you as a brand. With cookies going away, the industry is quickly shifting towards brand suitability, so it’s also important to start building a strategy around finding the right context for your brand to appear alongside and contextual targeting will be the way forward. Brand safety is not something you can set and forget, be sure to revisit this on a campaign by campaign basis.
- Fraud is unacceptable: Advertisers should be blocking sophisticated fraud at all times, so have an active discussion with your agency partners on the acceptable levels of fraud
Ad verification protects ad spending and drives optimal ad exposure. It is one of the most important innovations of the ad tech industry, and it is critical for today’s digital advertisers. However, verification needs to be the first step in the measurement journey and not just the destination. By looking beyond verification, marketers can improve their reporting and ad measurement by exploring performance indicators that reflect how an ad is impacting real business outcomes. Measurement is the quintessential first step in protecting and proactively steering marketing campaigns towards quality media buys and delivering ROI to help brands achieve business results.
Read Also : Short-form content & its impact on brand awareness
About the author:
Saurabh Khattar, Commercial lead – India, IAS