Hasta La Creative!

During the British colonial rule of India, the government was concerned about the growing number of venomous cobra snakes. In order to curb this threat, the government offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Naturally, the venomous snakes were killed in exchange for the reward. Over time, however, people started breeding cobras for the purpose of killing them to collect the reward. When the government caught on, the entire cobra program was scrapped. This, in turn, led the cobra breeders to set loose their now-worthless snakes. The only resulst of the whole exercise were a massive increase in the wild cobra population and an invaluable lesson in unintended consequences. A similar scenario is playing out in digital marketing with the emergence of viewability measurement.

After years of searching and debate, many advertising luminaries believe we have finally found the Holy Grail of digital media effectiveness in this new viewability measurement. But it appears that in our rush to find a metric — any metric — we may be losing sight of the effects that such a decision will have on the way the internet looks and works. The result, while not as catastrophic as wild venomous cobras, will have its own unintended consequences.

Viewability doesn’t measure if someone is actually seeing an ad — far from it. Technically, it measures if at least half of the ad is in the browser window for at least one second. Think about that for, well, one second. With banner blindness being a real challenge and consumers routinely ignoring banner ads — even those that are on the screen for some time — can an advertiser actually be happy knowing a fraction of its ad was on the screen for a mere blip? Just because the ad was served does not mean the ad was seen. We should consider replacing the term viewability with the wordier, but more accurate, “At-Least-Briefly, At-Least-Partially In-Browser Rate.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com