Duration-weighted impressions could be the most significant change in the underlying currency used by advertisers and agencies to value ad buys across media, but the concept has relatively little awareness and/or understanding on Madison Avenue.

Only a third of ad executives interviewed by Advertiser Perceptions last month said they were even aware of the new metric, which will become the industry standard for evaluating cross-media advertising campaigns, effective in 2021.

In March, the Media Rating Council said it was delaying the duration weighting until 2021 to give the industry time to adjust to the new metric. At that time, MRC CEO and Executive Director George Ivie told MediaPost that request to delay its rollout was coming mostly from the “demand-side,” meaning advertisers and/or agencies.

Interestingly, even among the 33% of ad execs who said they were aware of duration-weighted impressions, only a third of them said they understood the concept very well.

In a nutshell, the method uses a common denominator of time for measuring the impressions value of viewable video ad delivery across media media, including TV, online and mobile screens.

Some supply-side stakeholders have also expressed concerns about the change, implying that it might not be the most equitable way of assigning impression value across screens, but have been reluctant to suggest an alternative method.

Asked on an open-ended basis what they believe is the best “denominator” to use for comparing ad impressions across media, 77% of ad execs responding to the Advertiser Perceptions study cited “time” (see open-ended responses below).