‘Thanks to a plug-in installed in Firefox, Opera and Chrome browsers, we can recognise advertising content, both graphics and videos, on the websites visited by internet users. We can do this regardless of whether they are on Facebook, visiting Google Group websites or viewing ads shown using programmatic technology,’ says Piotr Ejdys, Gemius CEO. ‘We are the first company in the world to see the advertising market from the point of view of the user. This is innovation on a global scale, the best proof being the fact that we have just obtained approval for our patent application in the USA, which is now “patent pending”. It means we’re fast moving ahead of our competitors,’ he adds proudly.

The developed technology allows advertisers to pinpoint the type of audience reached by an online advert, how long the ad was in the user’s field of vision, and which videos were viewed for longer on social media. In short – to what extent the strategies of individual advertisers worked out. The software also shows the technology used to broadcast advertising campaigns, which enables the estimation of the actual market share of online advertising.

As explained by Marta Sułkiewicz, who is responsible for the development of online advertising studies at Gemius, up until now most markets have used two methods of measuring online advertising – the placement of scripts in adverts, and web crawlers. ‘While scripts remain a very accurate source of data, they do not produce a comprehensive picture of the market, because not everyone is willing to share data. In turn, the operations of web crawlers fail to take into account things such as ads shown on Google sites, on social media or using programmatic technology. What's more, this method stopped working when advertisers started buying services to reach a profiled audience rather than advertising space on a particular website,’ explains Sułkiewicz.

In her opinion, this focus on the user in the process of planning and buying online advertising means that the effectiveness of advertising should also be measured from the user’s perspective. Just like in the television advertising market, where the panel surveys are so reliable that they form the basis for all accounts in the industry. ‘Over the last 20 years, the market for online advertising has resembled a “black hole”. Advertisers were familiar with their campaigns and their market segment, but they didn’t know what was going on in the market in general, or with their competition. Our software and testing methodology provide an opportunity for the introduction of new standards to the market and – very importantly – a chance to make it transparent. This will definitely have a positive impact on the development of the entire online advertising market,’ says Marta Sułkiewicz.

Meanwhile, Piotr Ejdys concludes: ‘Now, thanks to software loaded in browsers and the use of research panels, we can extrapolate data to the society as a whole. This is similar to the internet study we are running in cooperation with PBI.’