Within the programmatic industry, higher standards of viewability have been on the rise. For those questioning what viewability means within the programmatic space, it is defined as 50% of an ad that is visible for at least 1 second. This is just the minimum standard defined by the Media Rating Council (MRC).

This push towards higher viewability is great, but it has some consequences. First, the vast majority of ads that are scored as viewable just barely make the grade. Integral Ad Science has stated that only “57% of display ads are in view for just 1 second.” Andrew Lusk of Integral Ad Science states that the second issue is that publishers have found creative ways around the placements being viewable by either refreshing their pages, housing interstitial ads, or placing ads within photo galleries.

So what does that mean for advertisers? It means that there is ever-increasing competition for those highly viewable placements. This can cause issues to arise in the programmatic space. One, in particular, being scalability, which is one of programmatic’s greatest features. When you increase the percentage of required viewability within your trading platform, you see a massive drop in available impressions and spend, which can hinder the scale and pacing of your campaigns.

The other issue is that this can require cutting out precious inventory that may, in fact, really be adding to your campaigns. However, the inventory may not be guaranteed to be of a desired viewability threshold. The number of sites that are too small or have not had the chance to be scanned for viewability ratings is staggering.

Traders can try to combat this is by adding in Private Marketplace deals that have a guaranteed viewability inventory or by incorporating white lists of sites that are known to have a high viewability. This, however, will increase the costs to reach those individuals your client wants to target. So you are left spending more dollars on potentially smaller audiences just to try to ensure that your ads are in view.

The road to increased viewability across programmatic might take a while, but if we can work towards increased viewability without sacrificing a significant portion of the scale, it will truly be complete in the eyes of this media trader. This means that we, as media traders and agencies, currently need to ensure to continue to educate our clients that with increased viewability comes the probability of increased cost, as well as the possibility of decreased scale.