DoubleVerify launches a new way to measure online ad effectiveness

Until now, DoubleVerify was known for helping advertisers to eliminate fraud and ensure their ads are running in brand-safe environments. This week, at the Consumer Electronics show, it's launching a new technology designed to measure whether those ads are actually effective.

Chief Marketing Officer Dan Slivjanovski told me that before this, marketers had to rely on "fast and simple tools" that are "proxies" for ad effectiveness - things like clickthrough rate or viewable time - or they had to wait until after the campaign to see whether it really worked.

So CEO Wayne Gattinella (pictured above) said the DoubleVerify team has spent the past two years looking at data that it was already collecting to find "metrics that best determine the predictors of how well the ad's actually going to perform."

He added, "In most cases, the raw material was there, there was just not the business case to really invest in it."

DoubleVerify's new Authentic Performance measure focuses on two main areas - exposure and engagement. Exposure includes a number of data points like an ad's viewable time, its total share of the screen and its audibility. Engagement looks at how users might interact with the ad, such as touching the screen, adjusting the video or changing the orientation of the screen.

Each campaign is then measured against a broader performance index, identifying areas where either exposure or engagement could be improved, for example by shifting ad spend or pulling back creative that doesn't work. And DoubleVerify is also studying these measures alongside transaction data from advertisers to confirm that there's a real correlation.

"Then to be able to optimize and take action on that information in a near real-time mode is the payoff," Gattinella said. "Not just post-campaign insights, not just post-mortem analytics - this is real-time marketing optimization."

DoubleVerify (which sold a majority stake to Providence Equity Partners in 2017) has been testing Authentic Performance with select advertisers, including Mondelez, before launching it more broadly this week; those advertisers will also need to be using the company's Authentic Impression technology.

"To be able to determine the performance of an impression, that requires the impression to be delivered in a high-quality environment to start," Gattinella said. "There's a layering effect."