Two Elephants in the Ad Measurement Room

The first elephant is the difference between digital consumption and digital advertisingconsumption. All the usual issues of viewability, bot fraud and, well, plain unnoticeabilty - and I'm looking squarely at you here, little banner ads ! - is why the percentage of ad exposures will remain relatively stable even as online consumption grows exponentially.(Though,obviously, the absolutes of ad exposures will grow with it)

The good thing with online video advertising where the difference is clearly quantified as the difference between ad impressions and ad views is that the elephant is easily sighted, understood and can be responded to.

The second elephant in the room is the less obvious one : TV ad avoidance.

There is simply no way of knowing whether people really watched your ads on TV. All that commercial ad break ratings tell us for certain - and this is keeping aside markets such as ours in MENA where these are not even available in the first place ! - is that people didn't switch off the TV and didn't zap channels.

Whether they walked out of the room or switched their mind off or buried their noses in their phones or , indeed, watched the TV commercials with love and adoration during those three or five or ten long minutes we do not know. And have no way of knowing.

So in effect we are penalizing online video for being transparent while not holding up TV to the same level of scrutiny and accountability. So TV ad exposures* all over the world are likely to be overstated simply because of a quantification gap (see figure)

* This post is only from the limited point of view of ad exposure. Engagement, impact, sales outcome et al are a different- though surely correlated !- matter.

While realistically speaking this gap can't be eliminated, can it be reduced ? Perhaps through syndicated sample survey-based research or,say, through more pervasive individual advertiser-level A/B experiments ? Hard to tell - but as viewer consumption boundaries blur and the market battles intensify, more attention will probably need to be paid to this TV elephant to size it up to some reasonable approximation.

(click to enlarge picture)