Higher viewability does not mean higher performance: Jaiti Hariani, DoubleVerify

“I am guilty of spending over 5.5 hours daily on mobile,” said Jaiti Hariani, Business Director, DoubleVerify, at the recently held e4m Confluence - Media Investment Summit 2023. “The moment you think about the time spent on mobile devices is on the rise, you will think it is an opportunity for brands today to capture attention, but it is not that simple,” she added, explaining how this was a fragmented space and before getting the user to engage with the ad they need to pay full attention to the campaign.

Sharing insights on other aspects, Hariani said: “We also know that the third-party cookies are deprecating. The end user is becoming smarter about their data privacy and controls. Brands today need to ensure that they still capture maximum attention of their users, even in such a complex scenario,” Hariani said.

Delving deeper into this, she shared the four core pillars of media quality – fraud, viewability, brand safety and ‘in the right geography’. “While we might have all heard about them, we are all guilty of treating them in silos,” she further pointed out. With this background, Hariani introduced the DV Authentic Ad product that adheres to the above-mentioned pillars of media quality, where an ad is fully viewed, by a real person in a brand-safe environment, in the right geo.”

Quoting a recent Forbes report, she shared that in a day a person views more than 4,000 ads. “That isn’t even a surprising number. Only a fraction of those ads get the chance to be seen by your end user,” she added.

Does higher viewability mean higher performance? “Most certainly not,” she believes. “This is where attention comes in. We need to move beyond viewability, and take the reach frequency to something more actionable.” Hariani then introduced the DV Authentic Attention product, which is built on top of the DV Authentic Ad. “We then evaluate 50+ data points at the impression level itself, which takes two dimensions into consideration - engagement and exposure.”

She shared that both these components play a very role in understanding how users are treating the ad.