ComScore Says 5.3 Trillion Ads Shown In 2012, But 3 In 10 Are Never Seen

TechCrunch reporting: just released its Digital Future In Focus report for 2013, offering a broad swath of data in areas like social networking, search and mobile. But the most interesting finding, at least to me, involved display advertising — that 5.3 trillion impressions were served in the United States, but three in 10 are never actually rendered in-view.
That’s consistent with what comScore said in last year’s report when it found that 31 percent of ad impressions are never seen by consumers. Even though this is ongoing issue, the report says we should “look for advertisers to demand more accountability and publishers to reconfigure their site design and ad inventory to improve performance in the coming year.”
More broadly, large advertisers are getting smarter with their ad buys, comScore says, using programmatic buying and improved targeting, so they don’t need to increase their ad buying as much as in the past. For example, there were 144 advertisers delivering more than 1 billion ad impressions in the fourth quarter of 2012 — pretty steady compared to the 145 in the same period of 2011.
Who are these large advertisers? Well, the top advertiser by impressions was AT&T, followed by Microsoft, Experian, Verizon, and State Farm. (AT&T was the biggest advertiser last year too.) The biggest advertiser category was online media, followed by retail and finance.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/14/comscore-digital-future-2013/