The idea that “all media isn’t created equal” is one of the oldest cliches in advertising.
But programmatic ad tech often overlooks the nuances of media quality and even the content itself when bidding on ad impressions. The prevailing theory now holds that ad formats and creative can be standardized and commoditized, since, after all, the audience is what’s being targeted.
It’s a theory the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) sets out to disprove, especially as it pertains to CTV inventory, in a soon-to-be-released paper the group teased during its CIMM East event in New York City on Tuesday. AdExchanger reviewed a pre-release copy.
The paper doesn’t just demonstrate that differences in media quality can be measured. It also argues that the ad industry’s fixation on tying media value to short-term outcomes has perpetuated longstanding industry challenges. For example, there are made-for-advertising sites that game the programmatic ecosystem, brands that overspend on cruddy CTV ads lumped in with quality placements and ad tech vendors that emphasize the value of audiences rather than the media itself.
“Quality has been a buzzword for a while in this industry, and no one’s really defined it, except, for the most part, in self-serving ways,” said Erez Levin, founder of ad tech consultancy Emet Advisory and a co-author of the paper.
So, in publishing this guidance, he said, CIMM aimed to reach “an objective, industry-wide shared consensus and framework” to advance discussions around media quality measurement, “as opposed to this limbo that it feels like we’ve been in.”
The point is not to promote new measurement standards, Levin said. Rather, CIMM wants to foster a whole-industry conversation that will make it so agencies, tech platforms and publishers must have a coherent answer when asked how they measure media quality.
The need for consensus
Another rationale for the CIMM paper is that the ecosystem of media quality, curation and programmatic verification services has exploded. Startups including Jounce Media, DeepSee, Sincera, Adalytics and Gamera all approach similar challenges from different directions. The emergence of two publicly traded incumbents, DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science, has also rejuvenated the dormant category. And the recent trends around attention measurement and deal curation have brought new ways to transact on quality signals.
The paper initially arose from CIMM’s work with the IAB to create the Attention Measurement Playbook for Marketers, which was released at the end of last year. In designing those attention standards, the working group returned again and again to the lack of consensus on how to measure the quality of ad impressions.
But progress is being made, and the CIMM paper wants to raise awareness of the new tools at advertisers’ disposal.
Levin has been pounding the drum on the need for better quality and attention measurement since at least 2017, when he was a product specialist for Google Marketing Platform serving both the buy and sell sides. The other co-author of the paper, Gabriel Dorosz, is the global advertising initiative lead at the International News Media Association and former head of audience strategy for The New York Times.
Dorosz said his interest in the project sprang from his publisher-side perspective.
“In the premium news publisher space, there’s a belief that the market is not serving those kinds of publishers well,” he said. “My passion is that quality publishers ought to be getting more of their fair share of ad spend, and this paper is a way to advance that.”
Dispelling myths
But, Dorosz added, the paper isn’t just focused on publishers’ need to demonstrate the quality of their media; it also aims to help buyers stop wasting money on ads that aren’t as effective as they think.
To that end, the authors attempt to dispel some myths that have become entrenched as result of buyers having been “oversold on the value of certainty,” Dorosz said.
For example, advertisers and the ad tech market are heavily invested in deterministic attribution as a confirmation or proxy for audience value, he said. If a bid request contains a deterministic identifier, that inventory is inherently seen as more valuable than a bid with no ID. Compared to the value of the ID field, factors like time of day, contextual data and device type are often marginal.
But the CIMM paper argues that probabilistic modeling, rather than deterministic data, affords marketers a better view of the true value of a wide range of ad impressions.
CIMM offers advice for factoring in probabilistic metrics like attention scoring and contextual relevance to discern an impression’s likeliness to advance the brand’s stated campaign goals. And it details how these metrics can vary widely based on the time of day and other contextual factors.
Likewise, the industry has gotten used to high price points for premium CTV inventory. But Levin pointed out that major streaming platforms still carry a similar high price tag even if an ad is served in the middle of the night, when audiences are generally considered less receptive.
In other words, he said, advertisers should know why their streaming campaign shouldn’t spend 40% of the budget overnight, and suspicious if it does.
A new quality model
To convince the industry to reemphasize media quality, the paper puts forth a new model that the authors say gets back to marketing’s roots.
This new model is primarily based on “The Quality Trifecta,” a concept that Levin has evangelized since last year. The idea being that media quality, creative quality and audience quality should be measured independently.
Media quality is then sub-divided into two factors: “attention,” or the prominence of the ad placement, and “situational context,” or the likelihood that the media surrounding the impression puts the viewer in a receptive mood.
The paper advises marketers to move beyond binary quality measurement methods, like whether an ID is present in a bid request, or whether an ad meets a minimum viewability requirement. Instead, it advises using “non-binary, relative and probabilistic” measurements like attention scoring that assess media quality on a spectrum of effectiveness.
These non-binary approaches are also better for comparisons across media types, Levin said. And they’re better at capturing subjective variations across audiences and other factors, like time of day.
The paper also explains why marketers should equally consider short-term performance and long-term brand-building opportunities. (Although, Levin said, small brands that depend on short-term outcomes should still prioritize immediate returns.)
CTV and buy-side first
The CIMM paper is a guide for the entire open web, the authors said. But they are clear that streaming media and CTV supply are the proving ground, because it’s the highest-stakes market with the greatest CPMs, most competitive demand and largest creative canvases.
Plus, Dorosz added, CTV hasn’t been subject to 20+ years of third-party cookie dependency. The players aren’t bound by the same status quo. Also, many of the tried-and-true pixel-based measurement approaches that are suited to other platforms don’t work well for CTV.
For instance, the paper advocates for rethinking viewability measurement entirely for CTV. Since CTV ads typically autoplay with sound on and across the full screen, the viewability question should be moot.
However, while industry-wide adoption is the goal, the authors agreed that buyers must lead the charge.
These theories only matter, Dorosz said, “if the buy side demonstrates success and drives repeatability.”
