In defense of Facebook: what it gets right, despite one wrong
Facebook may have fixed the misreporting of Average Video Watch Time (AVWT), but the fallout is still ongoing: after a host of reaction articles and a press statement from Facebook, the Association of National Advertisers is now calling for the powerful social networking giant to open their platform to greater third party measurement.
Adknowledge's Matt Sutton on Facebook's transparency controversy
One misreported metric becoming front page news is a clear sign that digital advertising is now in the limelight. Given all the progress we have made it can be easy to forget that before digital advertising, the notion of measuring audience reactions on an individual basis was nonexistent. Digital platforms and tracking now make this possible, while advertising on analog media such as television still does not offer clear oversight.
In Southeast Asia, at any given time of the day, there are now more people on Facebook than there are watching television. Traditional advertisers, who spent decades investing in mass media such as television are now moving their budgets to online video platforms such as Facebook and YouTube at scale.
The metric in question, AVWT, was assumed to report the average amount of time spent watching a video across all viewers. Instead, it reported the amount of time spent watching a video, but only for viewers who watch past three seconds.
It’s important to note though that AVWT is not a billable metric. It is just one of many metrics Facebook reports to enable advertisers to better understand how viewers react to their videos. Our own AdParlor data suggests that most advertisers on Facebook choose to pay for each view, so view time would not have directly affected the amount they pay.
For viewers to get something meaningful out of a video, they would need to watch longer than three seconds. Google’s blog is just one of many reports that indicate longer views translate to better brand recall. Hence, Facebook’s reporting would not have affected that analysis as much as it may appear.
And therein lies the crux of the matter: the Facebook platform allows you to analyse and optimise your campaign with an unprecedented number of different engagement and ROI metrics. It is already light years away from the lack of transparency and control advertisers have suffered over the years, blindly pushing video content through television - and we’re only just getting started.
As an industry, we should not be condemning Facebook’s commitment to transparency, we should be applauding it. The open sharing of metrics and dialogue between publisher and marketers is exactly what we need to be promoting. It’s healthy, progressive and takes the industry forward.
Being aghast at one metric on Facebook being wrong and then corrected, is analogous to people getting annoyed that the Wi-Fi on their flight is too slow to watch the latest episode of Game of Thrones. We are still in the phase where marketers should be thankful real-time reporting even exists, and is solving problems the industry did not even realise was there.
Matt Sutton is CEO of Adknowledge Asia.