A new study suggests that when it comes to measuring online ad viewability against brand metrics, time may matter more than size.
Putting Science Behind the Standards, conducted by IPG Media Lab, Cadreon and Integral Ad Science, found that (unsurprisingly) the longer an ad is in view and the more of it that is visible, the better it performs.
But it also found that some ads perform well in terms of recall and consumer attention even when they fall short of standards determining what percentage of an ad is on screen.
Putting Science Behind the Standards is a follow-up of sorts to Integral’s study from 2015 that found only 43% of ads are considered technically “viewable” according to the Media Ratings Council [MRC]’s minimum viewability standards.
Those standards are based on what percentage of an ad is visible to someone on a webpage and for how long. For example, the MRC says a video ad cannot be counted as viewable unless 50% of it is on screen for at least two consecutive seconds. While some have critiqued this standard or use variations on it, the MRC was the first to draw a line in the sand on which impressions were or were not fair game to incur a charge.
IPG’s research measured ad recall and used eye tracking to assess consumer attention at varying levels of visibility in relation to the MRC’s standards. Its online panel of nearly 10,000 people examined nearly 189 different visibility configurations and provided a baseline of effectiveness to play off the MRC’s guidelines.
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However, it is when the study begins to look at those ads that fall below the MRC’s minimum standards that things get interesting. When only a substandard fraction of the ad was on screen but a viewers exposure to it remains above standard, recall can still be relatively high.
“Overall, when percent in view is lower but time in view is higher than the standard, there is still a significant 10.4% ad recall. Compared to a non-significant recall when percent in view is higher than the standard and time in view is lower, there is an important distinction,” the report states. “Our regression modeling [sic] confirmed this conclusion: time in view is responsible for most of the variance in ad effectiveness metrics.”
The full report is available for download from Integral Ad Science.
