Learn about the pesky impression and how we as an industry can come to a consensus on its measurement from Underscore Marketing's COO.

With ad:tech recently come and gone from New York, there appears to be the same level of activity (and the same hint of reckless abandon) that we saw in our industry in the late '90s. I can't remember (literally) how many new advertising networks, affiliate marketers, search providers, et cetera I saw as I strolled through the exhibit. (Note to ad:tech board: If your hotel contract is up, please move the show to a bigger venue.) 

So, with this new youthful exuberance, you'd think that by the end of 2006 we would have solved one of the great dilemmas of our age-- the counting of impressions. Fair readers, I am here to remind us all that the impression currency we still primarily use to conduct online advertising transactions is sadly broken.

Our agency has recently come across several situations with significant (greater than 10 percent ) impression-counting discrepancies between Atlas third-party ad serving numbers and DCLK publisher numbers. The odd part is that both of these systems received MRC accreditation within the past five months. Theoretically, after the tedious audit process that both companies went through for certification, these numbers should be closer, if not the same. 

An informal poll of publishers and ad execs seems to confirm this problem. Our collective dilemma is thus: Either two of the largest ad serving/publishing platforms don't count an impression in the same way, or the process by which we traffic ads from agency/advertiser-to-ad server-to-publisher trafficking departments-to-live has devolved-- or there is some combination of both. (Note: As of the writing of this article, Atlas and DoubleClick were where I started my quest for some impression salvation. To be fair, we have also run campaigns where these very same systems' final counts were within 0.01 percent of one another. However, I am 99.44 percent certain that if we peeled back the layer of the ad serving onion, we would continue to find this discrepancy problem elsewhere).

By this point in your reading, you may be scratching your head and saying, "Well, so what? There are ways to address the impression dilemma as per IAB T&Cs V.2.0." To review, the IAB T&Cs essentially state the following: If the difference is less than 10 percent, the agency will pay the publisher invoice. If it is greater than 10 percent, the publisher will treat the difference as an underdelivery and offer a makegood. The third option for the agency is pay off the third-party numbers plus 10 percent.
 
I have little doubt that 99 other people reading today from either the buy-side or the sell-side have their own way of "dealing" with the problem. Unfortunately, dealing with the problem by generating draconian terms on Insertion Orders only exacerbates the underlying issue. When you think about it, 10 percent is a big number:

• Lose 10 percent in one of your classes in college and you go from an A student to the "average" B. 
• As a seller, lose 10 percent of an order and you don't make it into the next bonus pool to pay for your kid to get an A or a B in college.
• As a buyer, have only 90 percent of your media run and you run the risk of losing that budget for the next cycle. When budgets are into the millions and your agency takes its fee on commission, lose 10 percent of your $10 million media buy and your agency can lose tens of thousands of dollars in revenue.
• As an advertising marketing director, lose 10 percent of your projected media buy and your global marketing director says "Fine, I'll take that money and add some GRPs to the TV buy."

Even further, when discrepancies do arise, countless hours can be spent between all parties referenced above (okay, maybe not your kid in college) to frame, blame, and explain the dilemma, wasting yet more time in our already time-crunched existence in interactive marketing. And let's not even start on the issues associated with AJAX-developed sites (we'll save that for 2016).

So now that everything old is new again, what can we do to get back to the business at hand of delivering exceptional and breakthrough digital advertising engagement programs?

Next: What's ahead and how you can get involved.