A collection of digital video companies has banded together to adopt a technology that identifies whether in-stream video ads are “viewable.”
Supported by TubeMogul, BrightRoll, LiveRail, Innovid and SpotXchange, Open VideoView (or OpenVV) is a tool that tracks the amount of a video ad that is in view, and for how long.
Grant le Riche
“Online advertising is problematic in the sense that people don’t really know where their ads are running,” said Grant le Riche, TubeMogul’s managing director for Canada (TubeMogul developed the OpenVV code). “If they’re buying pre-roll, [they don’t really know] if the ad is actually going to be a pre-roll or if it’s going to just be video in an in-display unit.”
Viewability is an important issue since “not all impressions are created equal and not all video partners are created equal,” said le Riche. “If brands are paying premium dollars to have pre-roll, they want to know if it’s in view.”
OpenVV is available to the industry free of charge. Creating OpenVV as an open source code allows any agency, brand or video vendor to use, copy or edit the code. Le Riche wants publishers, video ad networks “and whoever else has websites” to join the consortium and make the OpenVV solution the industry standard for measuring online video viewability.
“This is going to be a big game changer for viewability,” said le Riche.
The code is being presented to the leadership of “Making Measurement Make Sense” (3MS) – a collaboration between the ANA, 4As and IAB – and the Media Rating Council (MRC) for potential use as a template for a digital video viewability standard.
OpenVV, said le Riche, will measure who saw the first load of the first second of an online video ad, how many pixels were in view at any given time, and also takes into account who is scrolling down the scroll bars, who is muting the ad and who is clicking over to another tab. Essentially, he said, it answers the main question advertisers have: “Did people watch my ad?”
Moving to this standard and integrating the open source code would also allow planners to see viewability across an entire plan, said le Riche. That would be especially helpful, he added, since planners and buyers have several vendors on any given plan and viewability means different things to different companies.
TubeMogul has created a demo of what OpenVV looks like that can be viewed here.
