What We Need To Do To Make Online Viewability Standards Work

1. Are we looking to correct a wrong - or just make incremental improvements?
   
   Advertisers and agencies have traditionally taken the position that their expectation of viewability is at or near 100%. They have assumed that nearly ALL of the ads they purchase are being seen. By that reasoning, a site with only 80% viewability would therefore "owe" an advertiser 20% more impressions (well, actually more than that) at the same price. How, then, would measuring viewability impact pricing? While viewability measurement can be a valuable tool for identifying bad actors, does this mean that publishers with strong viewability metrics could charge a premium over standard rates? And what happens when wild discrepancies are found? (For instance, I've heard reports by some advertisers who've found partners serving less than 10% of a campaign in view.)
2. What is the responsibility of third-party ad servers?
   
   While publishers should be focused on increasingly viewability, for this to be achieved, rich media vendors need to speed up their ad delivery times. Though a publisher can do everything right - the page loads quickly, ad calls are served asynchronously, etc - if a vendor's ad takes 5+ (!!) seconds to load, there's not much a publisher can do to compensate. The bottom line is that our business should also account for - and attempt to address - the too frequent failure to serve ads faster than it takes a viewer to scroll down a page.
3. And what about the "tricky" stuff?
   
   "Viewable" ads don't exist in a silo. Many legacy issues must be addressed - for instance, the notion of "above the fold," competitive separation, roadblocks and more. We need to come to a common understanding of what these mean in light of viewability. How do we, um, view continuous scrolling in which ads are served as a visitor moves down the page? And if an advertiser has purchased a roadblock, does that mean it should own every impression on that page? If a brand has competitive separation requirements, do they apply to ads served further down the page - even thousands of pixels away?

We don't mean to suggest that these hard-to-answer questions mean that achieving viewability isn't doable or that it's not a worthy goal. It's certainly necessary, as no brand can achieve success with a campaign that goes largely unseen, despite even a well-executed message and the benefits of modern targeting.