Online video demand-side company Videology has received accreditation from the Media Ratings Council for its video viewability measurement solution, making it one of the first credentialed providers of the relatively young technology.
“We’re all about providing the most up to date and reliable standards for all of brand safety,” said Brett Tabano, Videology vice-president of product marketing. “The vision of the company is to help TV advertisers understand how to follow their audiences as they migrate to additional screens. With that, we understand that there’s a lot of different challenges — one of them being viewability, making sure the ads are actually seen.”
The release comes a week after a worrying report from Videology competitor TubeMogul claiming that only about one third of video purchased in Canada is viewable.
Videology tied the announcement to the release of its new video ad quality service, which tracks viewability, brand safety and fraud across premium video campaigns. The service, called Viewpoint, leverages proprietary technology, as well as services supplied by ad verification partners DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science and White Ops.
Tabano said that Videology is primarily targeting brand advertisers — and what those advertisers want is for online video to mirror TV advertising as much as possible. That doesn’t just mean buying on GRPs. It means providing the kind of basic, unspoken quality guarantee that comes with a TV spot: that it will appear where and how the advertiser wants it to.
A big focus for Viewpoint will be quality of content. Videology has an internal team that vets every publisher it works with, looking for any unlicensed, unlawful, pornographic or otherwise inappropriate content. In fact Videology is so focused on inventory quality that it screens out all but 10% of inventory available on open ad exchanges. Most of its reach comes from impressions bought directly from publishers and high-end networks.
But the company doesn’t want to put too much weight on its solutions for viewability, brand safety and other problems that afflict digital advertising specifically.
“Our stance is, if you’re a solid ad tech platform, this is baked in there,” Tabano said. “Viewability, bot detection, and content quality should be looked at the same way as ad serving is looked at – it’s a piece of the technology itself. It shouldn’t be something that companies are hanging their hats on.”
