Online advertising’s privacy problem isn’t just about bad actors; it’s about bad metrics, says Marc Guldimann, CEO and founder of attention startup Adelaide.
“I think a lot of the invasive behaviors in the ad tech space can be traced back to a lack of a shared understanding of quality,” Guldimann says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
Consider how everyday systems rely on consistent and agreed-upon standards for measuring quality and quantity, like fueling a car or calculating electricity by wattage. If you went to a gas station, for example, and they didn’t have gallons and octane, how would you know what you were buying or how much you were getting?
You’d have to invent complicated systems to track every little factor – like tire pressure, weather conditions and whether to roll up your windows – just to try and guess how well that fuel would get you where you wanted to go.
Ad tech has that exact problem, Guldimann says.
“We don’t have a good measure of the quality or quantity of the advertising we bought, so we build this big attribution system,” he says. “Except that, instead of being a weirdo that measures all the different metrics in your car, we just wholesale invade the privacy of 400 million people.”
A lack of media quality standards is also responsible for the industry’s recent obsession with measuring outcomes. But fixating and transacting on outcomes “is a bad idea,” Guldimann argues.
It sounds great on paper, he says, but the end result is a bunch of media companies tripping all over themselves to chase cheap, low-value results.
So what’s the fix?
Unsurprisingly, Guldimann believes measuring attention isn’t a bad place to start. And it’s hard to argue that attention isn’t a reliable indicator of quality and performance – and that’s worth shelling out for.
“We’re trying to give the buy side transparency into quality,” Guldimann says, “so they can justify paying higher prices for higher-quality things, which then creates incentives for the sellers to make more high-quality things.”
Also in this episode: What’s wrong with the way we do brand safety today, why viewability isn’t a good proxy for quality and why attention is a critical KPI but shouldn’t be the only thing you optimize toward. (“You don’t want creative that captures the most attention; that would just be puppies and kittens with no branding at all,” Guldimann says, “and you don’t want the audience that pays the most attention because, fun fact, it takes drunk people 33% longer to read than sober people, and they remember half as much.”)
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