The idea that “all media isn’t created equal” is one of the oldest cliches in advertising.
But programmatic ad tech often overlooks the nuances of media quality and even the content itself when bidding on ad impressions. The prevailing theory now holds that ad formats and creative can be standardized and commoditized, since, after all, the audience is what’s being targeted.
It’s a theory the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) sets out to disprove, especially as it pertains to CTV inventory, in a soon-to-be-released paper the group teased during its CIMM East event in New York City on Tuesday. AdExchanger reviewed a pre-release copy.
The paper doesn’t just demonstrate that differences in media quality can be measured. It also argues that the ad industry’s fixation on tying media value to short-term outcomes has perpetuated longstanding industry challenges. For example, there are made-for-advertising sites that game the programmatic ecosystem, brands that overspend on cruddy CTV ads lumped in with quality placements and ad tech vendors that emphasize the value of audiences rather than the media itself.
“Quality has been a buzzword for a while in this industry, and no one’s really defined it, except, for the most part, in self-serving ways,” said Erez Levin, founder of ad tech consultancy Emet Advisory and a co-author of the paper.
So, in publishing this guidance, he said, CIMM aimed to reach “an objective, industry-wide shared consensus and framework” to advance discussions around media quality measurement, “as opposed to this limbo that it feels like we’ve been in.”
The point is not to promote new measurement standards, Levin said. Rather, CIMM wants to foster a whole-industry conversation that will make it so agencies, tech platforms and publishers must have a coherent answer when asked how they measure media quality.
The need for consensus
Another rationale for the CIMM paper is…