Between 40% and 50% of online ads served by publishers are actually never seen by Internet users, resulting in ineffective branding campaigns and a considerable waste of money for advertisers. In reaction, more and more advertisers use technologies to measure the viewability of advertising campaigns on publisher websites. This paper provides the first comprehensive economic analysis of the impact of the adoption of such technologies on the economics of online advertising. We construct a two-sided market model for advertising where publishers manage their website to attract Internet users and advertisers. We show that the adoption of ad viewability technology affects the number of viewable ads displayed by publishers, the price of ads and publisher profits, and user experience. We finally analyze the total welfare impact of ad viewability and examine how ad-blockers constrain publishers from both sides of the market.
This report contributes to policy debates by providing evidence on the dynamics of markets for audiovisual advertising in which both audiovisual media services (AVMSs) and video sharing platforms (VSPs) are operating. It addresses the following questions: - To what extent are audiovisual media services and VSPs competing in the same markets as comparable services? - What conditions are shaping the levelness of the field on which they are competing? The investigation covered Belgium, France, Italy and the UK. Using a detailed literature review, 26 key informant interviews, and a comparative legal analysis, the research found evidence that: - Though TV advertising and online video advertising on VSPs and other services do not serve exactly the same function for advertisers, AVMSs and VSPs are certainly competing for the same budgets and building relationships with the same advertisers in largely the same way, with media agencies playing an important mediating role. - The playing field is not even. The main reasons that the playing field on which AVMSs and VSPs are competing for advertising budgets is not level are related to imbalances in the human and financial resources they can invest in building relationships and in their ownership of and ability to use data. Interchangeability The distribution of advertising budgets resembles concocting a recipe from a number of different ingredients all of which have different features. Agencies do not see it as competition between offline and online, but about finding the right mix of numerous options to reach certain objectives, and they engage in extensive research and complex modelling to do this. Nevertheless, budgets are not expanding currently and there is increased pressure to achieve efficiency and short-term effects, reported against key performance indicators (KPIs). Agencies and advertisers still view TV as crucial for advertising, especially for brand building and awareness, and often TV advertising is the flagship around which the rest of the campaign is designed. TV is trusted because its regulatory framework ensures it is a ‘brand safe’ environment and a good viewing experience, and because the audited measurement systems provide transparency in terms of where advertiser money is going and what it is getting. For agencies and advertisers, online video advertising is attractive for its efficiency in reaching target audiences, often with significant cost saving and in extreme detail, and for the ability to receive rapid feedback on the response to ads placed. They also value online options for small or experimental campaigns. Despite remaining suspicious of much of the data that is produced and concerned about brand safety, they often need to reach the audiences no longer watching TV and they get excited about the optimisation possibilities available. There are differences in the qualitative rules around advertising and agency respondents reported being able to do things online that they cannot do on TV. Some of these rules have been equalised with the 2018 update to the EU’s Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD). Rules on misleading and comparative advertising are largely harmonised at the EU level and apply to all services, so this area of law was mostly the same in all four jurisdictions studied. A ban on political advertising on AVMSs was also common to all four, with no equivalent for VSPs. Efforts to address political advertising online are nascent, mainly focused on ensuring disclosure, and tied to efforts to combat disinformation. There is also a difference in product placement rules. The 2018 AVMSD includes user generated content (UGC) in the definition of product placement and allows it for the most part, but the exceptions, such as children’s and consumer programmes, in which it is prohibited for AVMS providers do not apply to VSPs. RECOMMENDATIONS As they implement the AVMSD, Member states should devise co-regulatory mechanisms that will be effective in enforcing content and advertising standards on VSPs and adhere to the Directive’s intention of levelling the playing field. The Commission’s guidance as to what qualifies as a VSP and criteria for co-regulatory mechanisms should be designed to maximally even out conditions among advertising-dependent services. Though there is no need to regulate UGC producers such as vloggers and influencers, national regulators should provide disclosure guidelines similar to those for content on AVMSs, and the European Regulators Group (ERGA) should investigate whether there is a need for the AVMSD’s product placement exceptions to be extended to VSPs. Industry bodies with support from national regulators should work towards standardisation of measurement within and across channels, including both agreement on a ‘common currency’ measurement for video and innovative ways in which the need to service KPIs can be addressed by all players. Relationships AVMS providers and VSPs take similar approaches to building relationships with agencies and advertisers. Both nurture long-term relationships with agencies, with personal relationships still being crucial. They also engage directly with larger advertisers to understand their aims and make them aware of the options they provide, particularly when rolling out new ones, such as the 6 second un-skippable ads online or addressable TV options. Whereas the most popular VSPs are global companies able to use that status advantageously for tax purposes and draw on extensive financial and human resources, AVMS providers are often prohibited by national-level rules aimed at protecting media pluralism from collaborating or even combining resources within the same group in ways that might allow them work towards addressing these imbalances. Some AVMS providers are engaged in transnational collaborations. Rebates and discounts based on scale and duration are common practice in how prices are set both for online and offline inventory, except when they are determined by auction in the programmatic systems. These and other contract conditions are subject to negotiations that, for AVMS providers in some jurisdictions, are constrained by trading frameworks. RECOMMENDATIONS Member states should revisit media plurality measures, including cross-ownership rules, with a view to enabling AVMS providers to co-operate in some areas, in which greater scale or scope may be crucial to allowing them to compete against global VOD and VSP services, without reducing the pluralism of views and content available to citizens. Member states should adopt transparency requirements similar to the French Sapin law in fair trading policy and EU policy makers should consider harmonising EU-level rules. The European Commission should closely monitor the implementation of national-level taxes on the B2B revenues of platforms, such as Italy’s 3% “web tax,” to assess the effects on the wider ecosystem and other businesses, and consider roll out across the Union. Data Ownership and Use VSPs can leverage the consent that they gather from their vast user base for targeting purposes and for the kind of tracking of an individual’s post-exposure journey needed to provide ROI results and make attribution claims. On the other hand, AVMS providers have only recently been requiring registration for users to access their AVOD and this is still giving them a rather limited type and amount of data on their users. The extent to which addressable TV gives AVMS providers useful data depends on the arrangements with the company providing the set top boxes to households. There is also an imbalance in access to online campaign-related data. The agreements that agencies and advertisers have with demand side platforms give them ownership of such data for their own campaigns. However the AVMS providers, or other publishers on the supply side, do not get such data for the campaigns run on their sites or around their content. A parallel might be if BARB, Auditel or Mediametri data was only available to agencies and advertisers. Our evidence indicates that data is an essential element of competition, and inventory holders such as AVMS providers and VSPs must be able to address the need for advertisers to demonstrate performance. Agencies and advertisers have concerns about dominance in the exploitation of data in this ecosystem that merit investigation. Respondents from various categories noted that GDPR appears to have further concentrated power in the hands of global platforms operating in the programmatic systems. Several mentioned the challenges of trying to compare across “walled gardens” of data maintained by those providing online advertising inventory and the lack of choice about what platforms they can use. RECOMMENDATION Competition authorities and data protection authorities should work together to assess possible concentration in the programmatic advertising system and in the wider market for video advertising.
The authors systematically review methods of online digital advertising (ad) fraud and the techniques to prevent and defeat such fraud in this brief. The authors categorize ad fraud into three major categories, including (1) placement fraud, (2) traffic fraud, and (3) action fraud. It summarizes major features of each type of fraud, and also outlines measures and resources to detect each type of fraud. This brief provides a comprehensive guideline to help researchers understand the state-of-the-art in ad fraud detection. It also serves as a technical reference for industry to design new techniques and solutions to win the battle against fraud.
The concept of Big Data has become increasingly familiar in recent years, and it is already an indispensible tool in the management of everything from supply chains and transport to health and education. This book presents the proceedings of MMBD 2023, the 4th International Conference on Modern Management based on Big Data, held in Seoul, South Korea, from 1-4 August 2023. The 50 papers included here were selected from total of around 160 submissions after a rigorous review process. Papers delivered at the conference were divided into 3 main categories: Big Data, Modern Management, and a special session devoted to Big Data-driven manufacturing and service-industry supply-chain (SC) management, but in addition to these general topics, there were also a number of papers related to lifelong education. Topics covered in the book include innovation in online education management with big data; digital transformation in lifelong education; big data analysis in lifelong education management; green supply chain management; big data analytics in supply chains; policy and strategy for new energy and the environment; smart grid load and energy management; decision-making on sustainable transport policies; modern healthcare management; and social strategy to manage human relationships. Of particular interest are papers concerning big-data analysis and emerging applications. Presenting innovative original ideas and methods, together with significant results, and supported by clear and rigorous reasoning and compelling new evidence, the book will be of interest to all those who use Big Data to support their management strategies.
This book constitutes the post-conference proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Advances in Computing and Data Sciences, ICACDS 2020, held in Valletta, Malta, in April 2020.* The 46 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 354 submissions. The papers are centered around topics like advanced computing, data sciences, distributed systems organizing principles, development frameworks and environments, software verification and validation, computational complexity and cryptography, machine learning theory, database theory, probabilistic representations. * The conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A significant number of online ads served by publishers are actually never seen by Internet users. This results in ineffective branding campaigns and a considerable waste of money for advertisers. In reaction, more and more advertisers use technologies to measure the viewability of advertising campaigns on publisher websites. This paper discusses how the adoption of such technologies could impact the economics of online advertising.
A large share of all online display advertisements (ads) are never seen by a human. For instance, an ad could appear below the page fold, where a user never scrolls. Yet, an ad is essentially ineffective if it is not at least somewhat viewable. Ad viewability - which refers to the pixel percentage-in-view and the exposure duration of an online display ad - has recently garnered great interest among digital advertisers and publishers. However, we know very little about the impact of ad viewability on advertising effectiveness. We work to close this gap by analyzing a large-scale observational data set with more than 350,000 ad impressions similar to the data sets that are typically available to digital advertisers and publishers. This analysis reveals that longer exposure durations (>10 seconds) and 100% visible pixels do not appear to be optimal in generating view-throughs. The highest view-through rates seem to be generated with relatively lower pixel/second-combinations of 50%/1, 50%/5, 75%/1, and 75%/5. However, this analysis does not account for user behavior that may be correlated with or even drive ad viewability and may therefore result in endogeneity issues. Consequently, we manipulated ad viewability in a randomized online experiment for a major European news website, finding the highest ad recognition rates among relatively higher pixel/second-combinations of 75%/10, 100%/5 and 100%/10. Everything below 75% or 5 seconds performs worse. Yet, we find that it may be sufficient to have either a long exposure duration or high pixel percentage-in-view to reach high advertising effectiveness. Our results provide guidance to advertisers enabling them to establish target viewability rates more appropriately and to publishers who wish to differentiate their viewability products.
This second edition of eCommerce Economics addresses the economic issues associated with using computer-mediated electronic networks, such as the Internet, as mechanisms for transferring ownership of or rights to use goods and services. After studying this book, students will recognize problems that arise in the electronic marketplace, such as how to gauge the competitive environment, what products to offer, how to market those products, and how to price those products. They also will understand the conceptual tools required to evaluate the proper scope of public policies relating to electronic commerce. Core topics covered in the book include the underpinning of electronic commerce and the application of basic economic principles, including the theories of perfect and imperfect competition, to the electronic marketplace. Building on this foundation, the book discusses virtual products, network industries, and business strategies and conduct. Additional key topics include Internet advertising, intellectual property rights in a digital environment, regulatory issues in electronic markets, public sector issues, online banking and finance, digital cash, international electronic trade, and the implications of e-commerce for aggregate economic activity.
Advertising is a company’s major form of communication with the market; it is a component of the IMC system, having a special impact on the addressee, and is a form of persuasive communication affecting consumer behaviour. Advertising may reflect information asymmetry between an advertiser and recipients. This book presents an assessment of the forms and range of consumer behaviour manipulation through information asymmetry in online advertising and explores the possible causes, forms, and effects. The work offers a new approach to the role of advertising in the digital world, especially its forms and impact strategies. The theoretical framework presented is based on issues related to online advertising, information asymmetry, and social manipulation. The book describes the ways in which these areas can be explored, and it presents the results of empirical studies. Empirical research allows for identifying companies’ moral hazard strategies and their consequences – e-consumers’ adverse selection. The research provides an empirical answer to the question: to what extent is advertising a transparent form of communication, and to what extent does it represent the world of manipulation? Based on an interdisciplinary theoretical approach, empirical studies conducted by the authors, and theoretical and managerial implication, the book encourages its readers to find their own answers. Given the interdisciplinary nature of this work, it will be of interest to scholars and researchers within the fields of marketing, media and communication, economics, psychology, sociology, and ethics.
How can individual marketers and their teams navigate the complex issues that seem to overwhelm the digital advertising industry today? They can learn about the metrics worth using, the importance of measurement and the technology available. With contradictory rules surrounding data privacy, measurement constraints, changes to supply chains and other complexities often too difficult to approach, the world of marketing is more complex than ever before. A Marketer's Guide to Digital Advertising helps marketers navigate the complicated world of digital advertising by diving into the metrics, money and technology fueling the marketing industry. Digital advertising consultants Shailin Dhar and Scott Thomson outline the forces shaping the current digital landscape and the common responses from advertisers trying to design their digital strategy. Walking readers through the common missteps made within digital advertising, they provide useful insight into measurement and thoughtful alternatives to practices often found lower on a company's priorities list. A Marketer's Guide to Digital Advertising offers ways to minimize waste and improve outcomes for brands and their business partners. The book illuminates the gap between in-house marketing teams, agency professionals and tech partners whilst helping readers make sense of the way money flows through the global ad industry.
