Digital marketing plays an ever more central role in most business's marketing plans. From retargeting, to social; there are plenty of creative and cost effective ways to get your brand under the noses of hundreds, if not thousands of potential customers.
However, despite the many benefits of touting your brand on the internet, online advertising continues to be plagued by fraud and viewability issues, as well as low creative standards, leading critics to question its effectiveness, and future.
Is online advertising broken?
Some say that display advertising has some fundamental problems that may never get fixed. They argue that it suffers from low click-through rates (0.1% on display ads), widespread click fraud and low viewability – (only half of the ads served online are actually seen by users). Concerns have also been voiced about the "creepy" nature of retargeting, irritating pop-ups and the prevalent use of ad-blocking software.
So is it broken?
We don’t think so. It’s just suffering from an image problem, and progress is already being made to fix the issues. For example, the Media Rating Council (MRC) and the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) recently released their ‘Viewable Impression Measurement Guidelines’, which set out parameters to measure viewable impressions. They state that 50% of pixels must be in the viewable portion of an internet browser for a minimum of one second, (two seconds for video ads), to qualify as a ‘viewable’ display impression.
By adopting this standard, marketers and publishers will benefit from the improved quality and accountability of their digital advertising efforts.
