This is one of the concepts behind comScore’s rollout of its new Activation suite, an offering that enables cross-platform targeting based on audience segments while drilling deeply into website content.

“One of the keys there is safety can have a different specific meaning depending upon whom you are as a brand,” says Aaron Fetters, SVP National Agencies & CPG Business at comScore.

“What our capability enables is for a brand to be very specific as to I’m okay showing up against this type of content but not this type of content,” Fetters adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).

“Our data’s ability is to go down into the actual text level within a page and say this is what this page is about and it’s a place that I’m okay to be.”

comScore Activation incorporates both digital and television viewing data along with contextual and verification technology to account for brand safety, viewability and invalid traffic. It is currently available in more than 15 leading ad tech platforms, including Adobe, AppNexus, Centro, Salesforce, Tru Optik and Videology.

At the ANA confab, Fetters says he’s heartened to see that advertisers have not just embraced the pursuit of a cleaner digital media ecosystem but that they’re thinking beyond that goal to focus on campaign effectiveness. One of their priorities is the balance between digital reach and efficiency.

“It’s great to know I have a clean supply chain. But the next step is to say am I maximizing the reach of my message to an audience,” says Fetters. “Am I capping frequency at a level that I want to, or is this just a strategy that’s not working for me?”

This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.

“We finally seem to be going a little bit beyond just the discussion of viewability and fraud and getting back to how does that combine with audience,” Fetters says in an interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “I’m hearing the buy side really begin start to ask again am I getting the audience I thought I was buying.”

Now SVP, National Agencies & CPG Business at comScore, less than two years ago Fetters was on the buy side, as Director of Global Insights at the Kellogg Company. He thinks it’s a positive sign that the industry seems to be moving beyond a sole concentration on viewability, fraud and eliminating waste.

“It think we’ve probably made a lot of progress in beginning to eliminate a lot of the waste in the ecosystem, but now I’m seeing the attention turn back to it’s not enough to just know that I’m getting a quality impression,” Fetters says. “I want to know who’s seeing that impression.”

Addressing the digital ad ecosystem, Fetters expects the consolidation among ad tech providers to continue. “Clearly we’re seeing it week after week, month after month,” he says.

It cannot happen fast enough, according to Fetters. “I think if you look at some of the campaigns that are running today, where you may have three, four, five, six tags on an ad to do various measures or activities against that ad or to collect data. Marketers are realizing this is too much and this is a mess,” he says.

Alluding to remarks at the IAB event by Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Mark Pritchard, Fetters acknowledges that marketers have mostly allowed the digital ad ecosystem to be managed for them. But that’s changing.

“Now they’re kind of stepping up and saying how much of my working dollar is going against non-working activity and can I be more efficient with that,” says Fetters. I think we’re going to see a big move toward simplifying the execution of ad serving, how do we get ads in front of consumers.”

It’s a question of necessity, according to Fetters, “because the buyers are starting to take notice, the buyers are starting to demand it.”

He says it’s fascinating to see the expanding desire by brands to build more targeted TV plans to reach specific audiences. And while addressable or programmatic TV “may be not quite scalable today, it certainly is not stopping the same idea of using data to build television-based audience in a new way.”

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

On Sunday, The New York Times ran a big feature that has taken this new idea, the dirty secret of true, “viewability”, to a much wider audience.

The article, “The Great Unwatched“, quotes Aaron Fetters, director of Kellogg’s Insights and Analytics Solutions Center, who partnered with ad tech firm BrightRoll on a 12-month analysis to uncover the viewability of Kellogg’s ads.

“Completion rate would have been a success factor in the past,” Fetters said at the recent BrightRoll Video Ad summit. “Today, we want to look at: ‘Is the video audible and viewable on completion?’ You start to see, wow, a publisher I previously would have considered very effective at a high completion rate, maybe they have (only) a 20% audible-visible on completion – I need to optimize out of that.”

Appearing alongside Fetters, video ad verification vendor Moat‘s CEO Jonah Goodhart explained viewability: “When I go to watch a TV episode, I click play … as a consumer, I go open another tab, I go check my email, I do other stuff until my content comes on – when I do that, my ad is not viewable. This whole rise of bots and nefarious strategies (faking ad views) is something that’s real.”

You can find more coverage of the BrightRoll summit here. Disclaimer: BrightRoll sponsored Beet.TV’s coverage of the event.

“It was very important to consistently measure viewability and how we can make improvements in the performance of our campaigns in terms of being more in-view for each impression we put in to the marketplace,” Aaron Fetters, director of Frosted Flakes maker Kellogg’s analytics and solutions center, tells Beet.TV.

“My comfort level continues to rise every day. We’re seeing lots of progress by the publishers, the agencies, the advertisers. We’re just now entering the age of being able to accurately measure viewability for video. We’ve seen great success in the ability of online video to drive volume. We want to improve the effectiveness of that.”

New technology from several vendors is shining a light on how few online video ads are seen by real people, exposing the tactics used by publishers who make ads play without really being watched.

He was interviewed at the BrightRoll Video Summit. You can find more coverage of the BrightRoll summit here.

Disclaimer: BrightRoll sponsored Beet.TV’s coverage of the event.