Did you know Digital Place-Based is now the Most Accountable Digital Medium Ever?
Spring sprung in an exceptional way for the DPAA. Earlier this year, it published three inter-related watershed international standards which are an important step in place-based growing up into a mature digital medium. In this video, I would like to focus on the Digital Place-Based Audience Standards and how they stand out as an historic achievement in the field of digital media and communication and establishes place-based and its cousin out-of-home as the most accountable digital media ever.
How is this so? Let me elucidate in three parts.
First, I will explain the recent history of digital accountability. Second, I will explain the current state-of-the-art. Finally, I will illustrate how the DPAA’s audience measurement standards shatter that standard – to the benefit of discriminating advertisers everywhere.
In 2004, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the IAB, began work on measurement guidelines with the goal to make Internet media a consistent, accurate and trusted medium so it could start capturing mainstream ad dollars. By 2009, the IAB finalized its MRC-sponsored Audience Reach Guidelines which detailed technical standards, definitions, and principles to tame the wild west that was Internet advertising. Notably, it introduced the Hierarchy of Audience Measurement which put unique users above devices, browsers and cookies. Advertisers want #ActualAudience!
In 2012 and in association with the MRC, the American Association of Advertising Agencies (the 4A’s) and the Association of National Advertisers (the ANA), it launched Making Measurement Make Sense, also known as 3MS. This began the standardization of the digital ad currency from ad plays to viewable impressions and set the opportunity-to-see an ad as the basis for its currency.
As long as an ad was viewable on the user’s screen – not occluded by other windows or off the page, this could be counted as a valid impression. Since then, it has ported that currency to nearly every digital medium including display advertising, video advertising, social media, mobile and now place-based.
Except place-based goes further to report on viewed actual impressions as well as viewable OTS impressions – and with good reason! While all other digital media have a 1-to-1 ratio of ad plays to ad impressions due to the expectation that only one user is at the screen at any one time. To be compatible with its digital cousins, place-based needs to place on the ad play what the DPAA calls an “impression multiplier” in their programmatic standards, thus shifting the focus from the ad play to the ad view – hallelujah!
This also means that the mainstay proof-of-play is being unseated as the accountability unit by the viewable impression. Something that portends well for Quividi whose computer-vision solution delivers these metrics in a scalable, accurate, reliable and automated fashion. In combination with an industry-standard ad-based CMS, place-based has the opportunity to create a true end-to-end digital platform with unprecedented levels of accountability for advertisers. And that’s kind-of a big deal!
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