Verification Must Evolve to Power Performance in Advertising

Over the last eighteen months, the digital ad industry has experienced unprecedented disruption, not only in the form of rapidly changing content consumption patterns but also in impending headwinds that are impeding traditional ways of targeting audiences and optimizing campaigns. From stricter privacy regulations, to the deprecation of cookies, to shifting mobile app activity with IDFA, traditional means of targeting audiences online are becoming increasingly challenged. So what’s a brand to do? And what does this mean for a healthy, open digital ecosystem? Without a suitable targeting substitute, brands are flying blind when it comes to assessing advertising inventory and risking the ongoing veracity of the ad-supported open internet that has supports such a diverse array of viewpoints

Enter verification, which is quickly evolving to fill this gap. In the ad world, verification has historically focused on ad quality. Quality can mean different things to different brands so our quality assessment is defined as the ad transaction is brand-safe, fraud-free, in-view and in-geo. These are all essential characteristics, yet they speak to the potential of an ad to perform. Actual performance hinges on other critical factors, like the right target audience, optimal ad presentation, a compelling message and break-through creative. Given recent industry disruption, verification can play an important role in the new performance paradigm — and bridge the performance gap left by new privacy regulations and restrictive browser policies. In short, the verification process employs the tools and technologies that can help advertisers power performance in the “cookieless” era.

For that to happen, however, the verification and measurement space needs to evolve. As an industry, we must move beyond basic quality standards to enable advertisers to better understand and achieve performance given new headwinds. Ultimately verification capabilities must align with a brand’s ultimate objective when it comes to advertising — to drive real business outcomes. That manifests in two ways.

First, measurement solutions can address performance by focusing on a key proxy for positive outcomes — “Attention,” which we define as the sum of “Exposure” plus “Engagement.” Exposure considers many factors, including an ad’s presentation, its intensity and prominence, share of screen, video presentation, audibility and more. Engagement, on the other hand, is a measure of user interaction — addressing key user-initiated events that occur at the device or ad level. These might span user touches, screen orientation, video playback and audio control interactions. Leading verification solutions have learned how to navigate the challenges posed by new privacy regulations and the limitations of cookie-free environments to deliver consistent cross-platform metrics (CTV, mobile, etc.). Leveraging these capabilities can empower advertisers to build sorely needed, powerful new performance proxies based on traditional quality measurement elements.

Ad targeting that drives heightened performance is also undergoing an evolution that can be accelerated by the kinds of privacy-friendly metrics that verification solutions trade in. An innate understanding of the context of an ad environment is a core part of any verification solution. Verification companies can deliver independent, third-party contextual targeting tools to support performance as cookie-based addressability declines. To be clear, this is not your grandfather’s contextual targeting; we’re talking about using advanced innovations such as deep semantic science and mission-critical ontological expertise to enable ad avoidance based on brand safety and suitability standards. This achieves precision and efficacy at a granular level that legacy contextual targeting solutions rarely approach. This same technology can be leveraged in reverse, for positive targeting, delivering ads to an audience based on interest or intent signals, and understanding the content and context adjacent to the ad.

Innovative and privacy-friendly solutions that support performance will keep advertising across the open internet thriving. Verification platforms manage massive impression-level data stores based on years of accumulated learning. Applying new performance-oriented analytics or metrics is both a natural progression of our business, and a driver of meaningful benefit to the global brands we all serve. By evolving beyond quality toward Attention and privacy-safe contextual targeting, we can help advertisers meet new challenges, prepare for further change, and drive new levels of performance for the coming years.

Click here to learn more about DV’s performance solutions, or contact us to get in touch with a representative.