GREAT FOR VIEWS, TERRIBLE FOR BRANDS.
It’s Saturday morning.
My kids — 9 and 4 — are glued to their usual line-up of cartoon chaos. Paw Patrol. Bluey. Something with weird dancing animals.
But between the innocent animal antics comes a string of digital ads clearly aimed at a very different audience:
SUVs. Skincare. Credit cards. Creatine.
Some poor soul has spent good media money ensuring my 4-year-old sees an entire pre-roll for a high-performance men’s moisturiser. Unskippable. Unstoppable. Unrelenting.
And you know what?
The view-through rate is probably outstanding.
But here’s the problem:
That “100% view” is meaningless.
My son can’t buy moisturiser.
He doesn’t want moisturiser.
He doesn’t even know what moisturiser is.
But that full-length impression? It’s sitting pretty in some report. Being touted as evidence of engagement. Maybe even brand lift.
It’s not.
It’s noise.
And more worryingly — it’s a false positive.
When the data looks good, but the reality doesn’t follow
We get it. View-through rates are important.
But what we’re seeing here isn’t performance — it’s pollution.
Ads served to the wrong audience, at the wrong time, in the wrong context.
“Views” that are logged but not absorbed.
“Impressions” that impress absolutely no one.
The result? A lovely set of numbers for the QBR deck — and zero commercial impact for the brand.
Didn’t we learn this already?
This isn’t new. It’s just digital déjà vu.
Remember those glorious TV media “bonuses” in the early 2000s?
You’d get 100 extra spots for free… all of them running at 3am in Lagos, during reruns of Walker, Texas Ranger.
It looked impressive on paper. But the client’s phone never rang.
Bad media then. Bad media now.
Just dressed up in programmatic buzzwords.
The ethics are real, too.
We have content regulation on TV. We have watershed rules.
But online? The standards are softer, the filters flimsier, and the responsibility increasingly shrugged off.
If we’re happy for kids to sit through a full energy drink ad they can’t skip, can’t understand, and absolutely don’t need — what are we saying about the value of media responsibility in 2025?
Because as marketers, we’re not just buying eyeballs.
We’re deciding who gets to see what, when — and why.
And when we get that wrong, it’s not just bad targeting — it’s bad business.
So, let’s stop measuring success by irrelevant metrics.
Let’s stop celebrating views that convert no one.
Let’s stop handing inflated numbers to clients that prop up the wrong stories.
And let’s stop pushing messages to the wrong audience just to beat the skip button.
Brands don’t grow from accidental views.
They grow from the right message, to the right people, in the right moment — delivered with some common sense and a little care.
Just a thought.
Now back to Bluey.
SHA. is a strategic advertising agency, creating brand strategy, advertising, design for print and content for web and social. If you want to know more, get in touch with nigelh@sha-agency.com or visit our contacts page.
“The opinions in this article are that of the author alone and in no way, reflect the opinions or viewpoint of the agency. Unless of course we happen to agree with those opinions completely, in which case they might, but otherwise they don’t”
