Hulu has said that adapting viewable ads has helped bring in more business. This is contrary to what other Web publishers have experienced. Publishers have found viewable ads rather hurt ther bottom line than help business.
Without knowing what to expect Hulu’s senior vice president of advertising sales, Peter Naylor, said that selling ad space using viewability data paid off well.
“We are absolutely benefiting from viewability. In one case, seven days after a campaign started, we got incremental money,” said Mr. Naylor.
Hulu is explicitly designed for people to watch long-form video content on a video player without any need to scroll. There are no hidden banners, nor a multitude of pages.
“In order to make yourself lucky you have to design for viewabilty,” he said. “We don’t do autoplay video. We promise [brands that] people will watch full 30-second ads. So delivering two seconds (the minimum standard for viewable ads the industry has embraced) is no problem.”
Mr Naylor is empathatic towards Web publishers caught in the race of oversized Web ads and higher rates. They also face a growing mobile audience and the challenges of Web fraud.
“It’s an incredibly challenging time to be a publisher,” Mr. Naylor said. “Over the last few years, we’ve seen agencies deal with this push from ad agency procurement departments. It’s become the golden age of accountability. Now you’ve got all this complexity, and viewabilty is just another thing on the list.”
