Here at the Over-Served Lounge on the campus of The Ad Contrarian Global Headquarters, we all agree that this is a truly amazing time to be in the advertising business.
An example: In the remarkable land of online advertising, there is apparently some controversy over whether ads that can be seen are more effective than ads that can't be seen.
We first reported on this raging storm last winter, here and here.
Well, Media Post reports that there was a definitive study released this week that proves once and for all that visible ads are more effective than invisible ones. Thank goodness that's been settled.
The reason this is important to the prodigies in the online ad business is that according to The Wall Street Journal and other sources, as many as 54% of all online ads are not visible. By the way, the online ad crowd doesn't use the word "visible." They say "viewable" because, as with everything related to online advertising, the more imprecise and confusing you can make things the better off you are.
The headline of one of the most astounding articles you'll ever read says, "Viewability Drives Awareness, Recall, Intent, TubeMogul Study Shows."
And the lead informs us that...
"Viewability matters when it comes to digital advertising -- if ads are more likely to be seen, they are more likely to be effective..."No fucking shit?
But wait...there's more. Apparently, the study also concluded that viewability can increase purchase intent, and product awareness, and message recall.
I'm just curious...how do you measure "message recall" for ads that are not viewable? I think it would be a fantastic breakthrough if the ad industry could come up with a way to calculate the memorability of stuff that isn't there. It would be like measuring the IQ of people with no brains... if you get my drift.
TubeMogul, the
According to
“Video’s inherent purpose is to drive upper-funnel activity... If a marketer’s goal is focused around increasing lift in one of these three areas, viewability should definitely be one of the primary KPIs.”If you don't understand what that horseshit means, don't worry. It's just the way nitwits say,"visible stuff is more noticeable than invisible stuff."
PS: I got your "upper-funnel activity" right here.
