Revelations that Facebook for years vastly overestimated a key video metric have raised calls for third-party reviews of metrics reports by social media networks. The scandal, dubbed “Overstate-gate,” also underscores the challenges marketers and advertisers face when comparing social platforms.
The average time users spent watching videos should have reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by the total number of people who played the video, David Fischer, Facebook vice president, business and marketing partnerships, explained in a blog post. It instead reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by the number of views of a video, or when the video was watched for three or more seconds.
Facebook told Publicis Media, an agency that purchases ads for marketers, that it probably overestimated average time spent watching videos by between 60 and 80 percent, The Wall Street Journal reported. The company also said it was introducing a new metric to fix the problem.
Fischer apologized for the mishap. “We know we can’t have true partnerships with our clients unless we are upfront and honest with them, including when we make mistakes like this one,” he wrote in the blog. “Our clients’ trust and belief in our metrics is essential to us and we have to earn that trust.” The metric did not impact video numbers Facebook shared in the past, such as time spent watching video or the number of video views, he said.
Unhappy Advertisers
Advertisers and marketers were understandably unhappy. The incident highlights the need for third-party verification, they say. “We have also been calling for a long time for media owners like Facebook and Google not to mark their own homework and release data to ComScore to enable independent evaluation,” WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell told Bloomberg. “The referee and player cannot be the same person.”
In its note to clients, Publicis said the change was Facebook’s attempt to distance itself from its earlier miscalculations, the WSJ reported.
“Essentially, they’re coming up with new names for what they were meant to measure in the first place,” the memo said.
Measurement Headaches for Brands
Besides causing a PR problem for Facebook, Overstate-gate highlights the difficulties marketers and advertisers face when trying to judge and compare different networks. Social media networks – who are often competitors – report their own data with their own metrics. In addition, the companies use different definitions for metrics like video views. The referee and player are the same, and the player makes his own rules.
As the New York Times explains, Facebook and Twitter count a video as viewed after it has played for just three seconds. Vine, which limits videos to six-second loops, counts a view once a video has been watched to completion. Snapchat, which does not publicly display the number of views, counts users’ posts as viewed after one second. Instagram, which hosts up to one-minute videos, registers a view after three seconds. Marketers are overwhelmed with data and metrics
Marketing cartoonist Tom Fishburne put it this way in his blog: “Marketers have no shortage of metrics on their dashboards, but they are still often flying blind. Marketing visibility can be simultaneously clear and opaque. To paraphrase Coleridge, the state of marketing is ‘metrics, metrics everywhere, and not sure what to think.’”
Facebook’s handling of the issue, however, was admirable – and reflects the commitment to accuracy and veracity across the entire media measurement community. Upon identifying the measurement issue, Facebook quickly revealed it, explained it and implemented a reasonable fix to deliver more accurate data.
Media measurement can be challenging. Although there may be flaws, media measurement services all strive to assure that their clients receive the most accurate possible results – and, like Facebook, quickly correct any known errors. Accurate measurement is vital for PR and marketing – and media measurement services recognize that clients must trust the data and accept that responsibility.
Bottom Line: News that Facebook inflated a key video metric for years is more than just a PR black eye for the social media giant. The “Overstate-gate” scandal reveals the measurement challenge marketers face when trying to analyze the value of a particular strategy and the difficulty in comparing the pros and cons of different networks.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
