We recently sat down with Dean Cook, ad technology manager at Time Inc. UK to discuss viewability, discrepancies, and Pub Expert, our solution for publishers.
What were the specific business problems you had that prompted you to use Pub Expert?
Pub Expert gives a range of insight including viewability, non-human traffic and brand safety metrics. Crucially, the insight is available to a fine level of granularity; the data can be sliced by date, ad size, advertiser, line item and also right down to sub-section.
How were discrepancies impacting your business?
Discrepancies in both impressions and viewability cost publishers in terms of operational resources. The ad ops and sales execs invest large amounts of time identifying, logging and analysing discrepancies. Also a cost can be incurred around wasted impressions where an optimization is made based on discrepant data. Finally, in extreme cases make goods can be involved.
How has using the Integral’s discrepancy-free measurement solved this?
Once agencies and publishers are using the same methodologies, the impressions and viewability statistics will be more easily reconciled and therefore able to be traded on. Pub Expert gives us greater insights into our campaign performance data that agencies are seeing so we can manage our optimizations to ensure we are achieving the results, which clients can actually see.
Has this been a game-changer for the industry?
Anything that reduces or removes discrepancies will move the viewability discussion onwards as this is what has been holding the debate back. However, with so many different methods for measuring viewability each outputting different results it’s hard for anyone to call which measurement should be deemed the one used universally.
How will Pub Expert and discrepancy-free measurement help Time Inc. UK’s overall digital strategy?
Time Inc. UK’s strategy is to provide advertising clients with premium marketing opportunities to target our reader audience, who are their customers, in the right context at the right time. We know that as a result of: the sheer quantity of commercial messages, often disregard for content, consuming content in real time and the interruptive techniques deployed to grab consumers’ attention, means consumers can be less receptive to the digital advertising.