Dive Brief:
- Twitter is expanding its third-party measurement for advertising reach via a group of new and expanded partnerships per a company blog post.
- For audience reach and viewability metrics, Twitter advertisers can now turn to Moat, Integral Ad Science, Nielsen and comScore. Moat and Integral Ad Science both offer viewability metrics, and advertisers can use Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings and comScore validated Campaign Essentials (vCE) to measure if ads reached the desired audience.
- Twitter reports Moat's measurements of video impressions on the platform reveals that over 99% of them are viewed by humans.
Dive Insight:
Measurement and third-party verification for digital advertising has always been a focus of marketers, although social media platforms have been slow to that table. Twitter's news is the latest indication that social media platforms are changing their tune about the third-party measurement.
Everything fundamentally changed for all digital advertising platforms in January when P&G Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard, in a talk at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, announced it had told its ad platforms to get accredited third-party verification for ad viewability by the end of this year or lose P&G’s digital ad dollars. At the time none of the digital players from Google and Facebook on through the social media platform spectrum met P&G’s standard. Google is reportedly farthest along the process and is expected to meet the deadline, and Facebook is the social media platform most likely to follow.
The Twitter blog post tacitly acknowledged the new state of affairs for digital ad platforms mentioning its new third-party measurement partnerships “includes ongoing conversations with organizations like the Media Ratings Council on the accreditation process.”
The push for greater transparency into digital ads' viewability and results is just one way that brands are seeking to gain greater control of the digital media ad supply chain as their investments increase but accurate assessments of impact remain few. So far this year, big brands have also removed ads from YouTube and other platforms that can't guarantee their messaging won't be placed next to unsavory content while others have experimented with narrowing their placement strategy to focus on higher-quality content without seeing any decline in results.
