Curious to know what one of the boldest minds in online advertising is thinking about these days? Check out what Jon Slade, Commercial Director for Global Digital Advertising and Insight for the Financial Times, shares in a recent piece by ClickZ, “The Financial Times’ Perspective on Ad Viewability.”

In this pithy piece, Slade talks about industry concerns surrounding viewability as it embarks on its path to standardization and the “critical issue” of accurately measuring impressions.

We were excited to get a shout-out from Slade, who mentioned the work Chartbeat and the Financial Times have been doing together regarding the application of audience attention metrics to new and premium types of display advertising formats. Slade states:

“In addition to optimizing our site to ensure maximum viewability for our clients, we’re also working with Chartbeat to measure not just whether an ad is seen or not, but for how long. We believe that the amount of time the target audience is exposed to the advertiser’s message has a direct effect on its impact. We can tell our clients how long each impression has been viewed, and the total duration of exposure across the campaign.

In essence, there’s no reason why publishers’ can’t start to trade ‘exposed time’ as a currency, not just impressions. This is a metric that we feel is closer to the actual outcome an advertiser is seeking – impressions themselves are just a convenient mechanism to trade.”

We don’t think we could have said it any better ourselves. In response to this piece, Chartbeat ads product guy Alex Carusillo notes, “Viewability is really important and should happen no matter what. But we think what comes next is the most exciting part. When you look at Active Exposure Time, that black box of viewability opens up and you can see the difference between good and bad impressions. We’re lucky to be partnering with Jon and the FT to turn audience attention into something publishers can build businesses on.”

Check out this visualization below to get a sense of how Chartbeat metrics can measure impression quality: