Viewability Standard Pushback; Mobile-Local Consolidation

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

Viewability Nonstarter

Ad buyers and trading groups are pushing back against the IAB’s proposed viewability standards. In an open letter published last week, the IAB claimed that 100% viewability measurement is an impossibility, and that advertisers should aim instead for 70% viewability. But on Friday the 4A’s published a letter of its own, claiming it will “not endorse” the IAB’s guidelines. Magna Global EVP Todd Gordon adds, “Running a campaign and paying for 30% of the ads not being viewable isn’t acceptable to us or our clients.” More via the WSJ.

Mobile-Local Winnowing

Speaking to Street Fight about the future of mobile-local advertising, Thinknear GM Loren Hillberg says consolidation is on the horizon. Mergers will come “at least as much from a strategic perspective as … from a scale perspective. I do think there will be a couple winners on the mobile side who will have a chance to be really scaled up entities that deliver value long-term. I’d have a hard time picking those people today.” Thinknear, whose parent company is Telenav, specializes in location-based and targeted mobile advertising. Read it.

Prioritizing Programmatic

Dennis Publishing will pursue programmatic and native ad strategies in 2015, Dennis Digital managing director Pete Wootton tells The Drum. “If you take our app strategy then it’s increasingly looking at how it relates to our responsive web design and mobile web strategy. If we don’t look at these things as being intertwined then there’s a risk of chasing the same audience in two different ways.” Everything is connected. Dennis titles include The Week, Men’s Fitness and Mental Floss. More.

The Second Stream

Facebook quietly introduced a separate news feed to its mobile application on Monday that’s visible to a limited number of users. A tab titled “Find Apps” leads those users to a stream of app-install and engagement ads. “We’re always looking for ways to help people discover apps that are relevant for them, as well as opportunities for advertisers to reach these people, so we’re exploring a few new places to surface apps we think people will be interested in,” a Facebook spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch. Facebook says that CPCs, CPIs and eCPMs in its app-install news feed will reflect what advertisers are charged for ad placements in the regular news feed.

Dave Morgan’s Crystal Ball

Simulmedia CEO Dave Morgan, a founding father of ad tech, maintains that the TV ad business is warming up to programmatic, and that a weaker-than-expected TV ad market is fueling the change. “As cable nets, the broadcast nets, [and] the distributors recognize that they can yield significantly more revenue cost effectively by packaging it differently, they’ll do it that way,” he said. More via Broadcasting & Cable.