Maxus to stop buying autorefreshed ads
Maxus has become the first media agency to publicly refuse to buy autorefreshed online advertising.
David Gaines, CEO of the WPP-owned agency told Mumbrella that the industry had been talking about the issue for too long. He said: “We keep tiptoeing around the issue. Everybody at the agency got told last week. We are going to create preferences for the sites that don’t have autorefresh.”
All five of Australia’s largest publishers use autorefresh, arguing that the page needs to be automatically updated every few minutes in order to showcase the latest content. Critics argue that autorefresh is used as a means of serving multiple ads regardless of whether the user is even looking at the screen and that it would be relatively straightforward to refresh only the editorial content.
Today’s Australian reports that using autorefresh extends the apparent session duration by 75% and the number of times that ads are served by 20-40%.
Finally, some SERIOUS action. A bold move that will hopefully be the tipping point for a universal audit by ALL publishers. Well done to Maxus and David Gaines.
Ditto to everything Neil said. Green ticks all round!
Agreed, well done to David Gaines, Tom Kelshaw and Maxus for taking a stand!
The buying ban applies to any site not ABA audited, not just whether a site uses A-F or not so it should also help to clean up the issue of sites using unverified home-cooked Google Analytics figures.
The quote from the Aus article:
“We’re getting to the point where nothing’s really happening (from an industry perspective), so we’re going to officially boycott sites that don’t adhere to the ABA’s audit process,” Mr Gaines said.
Great move, and hopefully will see other agencies follow suit. An important step towards having numbers across the digital industry that buyers can trust.
Alexx,
What does an audit cost?
“The buying ban applies to any site not ABA audited” – even more exciting!
@Leon,
Audit fees vary depending upon number of sites and traffic volume but the entry-level fee for a small site is only $95 + GST per month.
Larger publishers or networks with multiple sites may pay up to $2k – $5k per year, so still affordable.
I would like to remind everyone we are a non-profit industry body owned by our tripartite members (advertisers, publishers & agencies), so fees go back into the industry through the audit initiative and related industry education programs.
Well done David!
I wonder which agencies will follow suit by the end of this week.
“likes” this – standing up for what is right
It’s actually common practice for agencies to audit publishers and then trade accordingly to ensure effective buying across auto refreshed sites. The bigger challenge exists in the performance space – if a page within a network is auto refreshed there is no way for agencies to police, less chance users will view the ad and even less chance that the ad will impact a sale.
Cheers Alexx. (Couldn’t find a rate card on your site.)
Fantastic news. Justification for a lot of conversations held over time about how the portals and or other sites were ripping the industry off with over inflated statistics.
Well done David.
For the iab this will be difficult for them to deal with. Particularly as the founding members are the very media giants that implement auto-refresh. Paul F is right on the standard measure as well. The work the iAB is doing there is important to all of this.
Note to all. When I first started to mention this I was told to not “interfere” with the way the online advertising business was run. That was some 12 years ago. Seems the industry really has taken that long to wake up. Am sure I was not the only one!
Watch this space. huh 😉
Mirroring the positive sentiment already express…. Great news! Well done David, Alexx and others who have been promoting legitimacy, credibility, honesty. May this be the first of many such announcements.
Full credit to Maxus for taking a stand.
I do believe that it would have been more impactful to align at least all of the WPP media agenices at once – if not even speak to the wider media groups to properly put some pressue on the publishers for a change.
Good one. Q for Dave, why the exception on performance. AR is still as big an issue there, cookie dropping for impressions never seen by human eyes.
As Cheryl Kernot’s Democrats would say in the 90’s way to keep the bastards honest
Quick clarification due to offline questions about audit fees. Publishers paying $2k-$5k refers to mid-sized publishers, larger than small sites. There are exceptions to this of course – just keeping it simple.
Even larger networks with 100+ sites may pay more depending on how they wish to design their audit schedule.
Hey Ben – performance is absoloutely about CPC and CPA activity where we can work through and quantify what constitutes a response. Not network CPM buys.
At the end of the day its simply about clarity around what we are measuring from planning online to the transaction of client money for audiences. Its a bit rich to suggest we have a product based in data and analytics but throw money around with no idea what we’re really buying.
I hope it will just accelerate some sensible discussion and agreement with publishers and will allow us to progress with metrics all sides are comfortable with.
We’ve got too much thats just around the corner; IPTV etc. It’d be a crime to slow the pace at which that can grow because we haven’t got the basics right.
@ HG,
This is not difficult for the iab to deal with at all as it really is an issue for the individual agencies and the individual publishers/networks. As the buyers and the sellers in this marketplace, it is very much up to them to agree the terms and conditions on which they will, and will not, do business.
If some buyers have issues, be it AR or others, with some publishers and/or networks, then they have every right to take those issues up with their trading partners.
What industry bodies and other groups need to be very careful of doing is dictating the trading terms of commercial transactions on behalf of their members.
As you go on to say, and thank you for your support, we will continue to work on the strategic issue of standardising online audience measurement in this market.
Like you I’ve been in and out of this industry for over 12 years and it’s time!
Auto-refresh on pages that don’t have very regular content updates has only be used by the top 5 in the last couple of years. One does it and they all follow over fear of sliding down the MI rankings. Was never going to last long.
So once this issue is fixed, it’s back to 101 slide shows and sites with grap navigation that makes you jump forward and back to go through content. Or maybe even better, we’ll see the return of pagination – that was a beauty!!
Raises a question for you all though – putting auto-refresh aside, how are you going to continue this debate on how long an ad is served for an whether or not the ad has indeed been seen?
It’s probably time to admit that all campaigns will be performance based fairly shortly and then we can all pretend that brand never existed.
Online needs some more marketers and less analysts who get excited over a blip in the code like this issue.
“the blanket ruling, which means the agency will not buy from autorefreshed sites on a CPM basis.”
Playing a dangerous game writing off CPM and giving CPA / CPC preference due to a ‘measurable response’. Hoorah for below the fold ad units and extraordinarily inflated post impression windows!!
How about we move beyond measuring eyeballs and start to measure business outcomes?
@a dog, @cookie cutter, good points re: measurement. Eyeballs, impressions and clicks are not good measures of business outcomes, but they ARE the trading currency of digital media. And we need to make sure we trade efficiently whilst we look at other metrics of real significance.
Just to clarify, Maxus is not writing off CPM buys – only CPM buys on non-ABA audited and especially auto-refreshing pages. And if publishers revert to inflating imps with galleries, ridiculous pagination and other tricks, we’ll make a decision on that also.
Pagination isn’t anywhere near the scale of Auto Refresh … in many instances it just makes sense. A 2,000 word article on one screen is ridiculous. Spreading it over a few pages is more about the experience than creating page impressions.
Re performance/CPC/CPA etc being excluded – many argue (not sure of the validity) that the agencies vigorous appetite for these performance deals is what is fueling auto refresh and the need to artificially create inventory.
One publisher said to me when I was agency side “if you guys didn’t screw us so hard on the rates we wouldn’t have to do this.”
If an auto-refresh site has double the page impressions of a non auto-refresh site, why don’t you just demand to pay 50% of the CPM price ??
We did an informal survey of other agencies yesterday and were variously told:
“we already audit sites that we buy from and ask/check to see if they do AR. If they do we then either change the CPM rate accordingly or buy only on a tenancy basis. It seems silly for sites to continue using it as it artificially inflates your site metrics and will reflect poorly on them.”
“We have had experiences on past campaigns where the (unaudited) numbers from some places just didn’t add up ”
and finally “we’re working on our own technology to reject AR requests.”
Also as site owner of my247.com.au, we are about to launch our new site full of the latest AJAX call back technologies.
In non-geek terms this means you will be able to navigate huge amounts of content without leaving the current page.
This is great for the user-experience but will ultimately slash our page and ad-impressions, however will increase average time on page and the opportunity for the user to engage in the ad.
Just more factors as more sites move this way to take into account…
Well done Maxus
I agree with @Ben S on pagination being a different case as people will actively click through to seek content from top 20 lists and photo galleries, however it doesn’t reflect well on the publisher when the content is spread so thin that a top 5 list goes over 11 pages.
Okay, now we’ve got this one sorted, how about moving on to ad unit spam? Some Fairfax pages have 20+ different ads. That’s doing more to drive down CPMs than AR.