Last week, Digiday covered Say Media President Troy Young’s fresh attempt to tidy up the web by redesigning the entire web page environment – essentially redefining the relationships between ads and content. His efforts, which promise to reduce clutter with sleek, effective but unobtrusive ad design, launched with the single, 300 x 900 banner ad now running on the side of remodelista.com. Young’s venture has fantastic implications for Say Media and their clients, as Say Media is armed with the ammunition to not only eliminate the clash between editorial design and ad placement, but also raise the arms race for impressions to the next level, ushering in an era of quality and quantity.
Young’s ad revolution is five years in the making. It’ll likely take another five years to perfect and optimize — you have to love the pace of innovation in this industry. Right now, Young is providing answers to those who truly value inventory quality and brand safety (in this instance, I’m using brand safety as an umbrella term for what Young calls “clean” and “tidy” properties). You see, brand safety isn’t just risk management of objectionable inventory; even once objectionable inventory has been eliminated, there are still often fundamental flaws to how the ecosystem of editorial and ads appears to the user.
And it isn’t just about brand safety, either. In this day and age, we can’t deny that advertising is more consumable than it’s ever been. “The app is the media” was one of the resounding truths of the past two years, and the numbers are starting to back that up: Apple announced this week in their Q4 2011 earnings that a total of $4 billion had been paid out to publishers via the Apple App store. And then there’s the vast potential of Facebook’s new app ecosystem. By making ads so consumable, Young has aligned Say Media to become one of the few companies that will be an excellent home for forward-thinking people looking to invest in creative and messaging that empowers consumption in display media—ie. those who attribute value to their brand equity and safety.
Most importantly, Say Media’s 300 x 900 banner ads—because they always remain in view—should be evaluated at a much higher rate than other ads by demand side platforms (DSPs) and supply side platforms (SSPs). The statistics back it up. At AdSafe, we recently conducted a study of billions of impressions from our data that revealed that 38% of ads are never seen by the user, and 56% are viewed for 2.5 seconds or less. We also found that users who saw a long impression (5 seconds or more) were 31% more likely to convert than a user who saw a short impression (less than 5 seconds), and users that saw multiple long impressions were 250% more likely to convert than users who saw multiple short impressions. That makes ads that stay in view extremely valuable. But forget staying in view for 5 seconds—Say Media’s always-viewable ads are a whole new ball game, especially since the consumable ads contribute to the user experience. AdSafe will be valuing Say Media’s ads much higher. I predict that DSPs, SSPs, and agency trading will follow suit.