Sir Martin Sorrell: Online video viewability standards are ludicrous

Sir Martin Sorrell CEO at WPP –one of the largest advertisement networks worldwide- has a clear picture of the advertisement technology future. Speaking at The Newspaper Works Future Forum conference in Sydney, Australia, he urged improvements in the way that online video viewability is measured. Sorrell pointed out that the standards to video viewership in online media need to rise and criticized that the scale that is used for viewership in Facebook is three seconds. But according to a Nielsen study about Facebook, people who watched under three seconds of the video ad created up to 47% of the total campaign value, and people who watched for fewer than 10 seconds created up to 74%. “The scale used for viewership is three seconds, and that I would say is ludicrous in relationship to the traditional viewability or readership standards that TV and newspapers have to meet” Sorrell said. Sorrell doesn’t agree with Nielsen and said that its measurements overestimate online and underestimate offline. Asked about the rise of programmatic, he told delegates that they would be wrong to try to fight it. “You can’t fight the rise of programmatic” he said.