John Wanamaker – we now know which half of your ad money is wasted!

In one of the most famous quotes in advertising, John Wanamaker is reputed to have said:

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.

Since about 2014, companies like Google and comScore, and organizations like the Internet Advertising Bureau have started to report on ad viewability, and the results are startling. About half of all ads served are never seen by a human, resulting in $100 billion ad spend wasted every year in the US alone, not to mention wasted research dollars that may have been used to plan the ad placements in the first place. Why are so many ads not seen? While a web page itself is infinitely big, viewers can see only a portion of the page in their browser window and must scroll to see more – so ads are often out of viewer range. A smaller number of wasted ads are viewed – but not by humans but by bots or spiders. Companies now demand more transparency. P&G cut $100 million from their digital marketing spend in 2017, reporting little impact on their business. What advertisers want are metrics that can be trusted and which accurately reflect the reality of what is occurring in the market. We have had ad tools to measure ad impressions online, that is, ads that are “served” or delivered, and tools that provide limited information on the audience, but not tools which measure viewability. This, however, is no longer out of reach. Using technology from The DMA Institute, SSI now measures where ads were placed on the screen, how long they were in view, and more. A tag is placed on an ad when it’s created. Then as soon as the campaign launches, the tag starts gathering information, giving us granularity down to one second of exposure. For a simple banner ad, we might decide to measure views of one or two seconds, but for a video, we might only care about people who have had the video in view for at least 10 seconds for example. By marrying the tag information with cookies placed on panelists’ browsers, we can now tie information about people worldwide specifically to the ads they have seen. We can tie together cross-device usage, demographic, geographic and a wealth of other data. Armed with better technology, we can conduct vastly more accurate traditional, classic ad effectiveness testing – asking about awareness, recall, impact of brand perception – but in the digital environment. And, this data will be based on a sample of people who have been validated as seeing the ad as well as a matched sample of people who are known not to have seen it. Surveys are really the only way to know if an ad had the intended impact on perceptions — whether it’s perception of a brand, a product, a candidate, or a special offer. By connecting all these data sources together – relying on passive data for what passive data is best at and using survey data for the why – we can get closer to the online consumer than ever before. Mr. Wanamaker, we finally have some answers for you! Jackie Lorch SSI Jackie Lorch is VP Global Knowledge Management at SSI. A frequent guest speaker at industry events, she is an ESOMAR US Representative and serves on the board of Marketing Research Institute International. In 2014, she was named one of “20 Researchers You Should Know” by Research Magazine.