Everyone's talking tear sheets. Remember those holdovers from the offline world? If you need a refresher, Answers.com defines a tear sheet as:

...a term used by Advertising agencies to denote a page cut or torn from a publication to prove to the client that the advertisement was published. Media buying agencies are often required by clients to provide tear sheets along with a post analysis of any advertising campaign.

It's easy to prove an ad ran in a print pub - just pull out a pair of scissors and go.  In the offline world, it makes sense that advertisers would want to see physical evidence that their ads ran, given the difficulty of measuring who sees a print ad, let alone how long they looked at it, or what impact it had.

What does a tear sheet mean online? For example, how do you prove that your highly-targeted campaign is actually those valuable Manhattan moms after 8 pm? Obviously a screenshot and timestamp would offer something analogous to a traditional tearsheet, but therein lies an obvious problem: While an ad operations manager can generate a screen grab for a national or broadly-targeted campaign, that's not so easy with a niche or behaviorally-targeted campaign. Even if your ad ops manager can get that niche campaign advertisement to appear despite not being in the campaign's target audience, then you've wasted an ad impression for the advertiser.

Ad operations managers share a common sentiment: Tear sheets are anachronisms in the online world. With online advertising's hyper-detailed targeting, broad reach, detailed reports, and amazing accountability, many ad ops managers think there's no need for tear sheets anymore; they're simply not relevant.

That said, advertisers still ask for tear sheets almost every day and do not seem to believe that tear sheets have become obsolete. Advertisers are spending good money on their campaigns and want to see proof that they got what they paid for. In the quest to satisfy advertisers ad ops managers have had to resort to all sorts of questionable techniques, including:

1.       Brute force, that is, hitting Refresh repeatedly on a page where you think the ad is likely to appear.

2.       Test pages: Running the ad on a test page that looks like the real page, just to force it to appear for a few impressions.

3.       Photoshop: Using a tool like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Paint to paste a picture of the ad on top of a picture of the page.

4.       Outsource: Delegating the tear sheet job to a vendor or partner who, in turn, probably uses one of the preceding techniques.

As an alternative, I propose giving the advertiser a mockup, which would provide a visual illustration of how the ad looks in a live campaign. The mockup would not provide evidence after the fact (that's what reporting data is for); instead, the mockup would simply show the ad in context on a page where the ad was scheduled to run or was currently running.

As for documented proof that the ad ran, here the advertiser could turn to ad servers and networks for a huge volume of data. For example, on Adify we provide site-level visibility for each ad in a campaign, giving an advertiser far more insight than a traditional tear sheet could ever offer. Industry-standard counting metrics designed by organization such as the IAB and MRC, and tested by third party auditors, provide further confidence to advertisers that the ad actually ran where the ad server says it did.

The combination of a mockups, transparent reporting, and audited metrics should address most online advertisers' needs for visibility. Mockups would offer other advantages including:

• Potential to be automated, using screen grab technologies.
• Not wasting impressions.
• Not forcing ad ops managers to resort to tricks.
• Potential for cross-industry, cross-platform standardization

Can we agree to toss out the virtual scissors and move on to mockups? How are you dealing with tear sheet requests? How do you respond? How do you think the industry should address this topic?

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