Over the weekend, the New York Times published a piece that caught our attention and should should certain spark further discussion within the online video ad industry. Titled “The Great Unwatched,” the piece took on the issue of video ad viewability, with 57 percent of video ads in one study deemed “unviewable.”

In too many cases, the middlemen in the space aren’t transparent about the nature of the buys or where ads are actually running:

It was mid-December, and Blue Chip was in the middle of a campaign — for a client that doesn’t want to be named — selling what the agency would describe only as “a mom-related product.” A few weeks earlier, Sarah VanHeirseele, an agency vice president, and her team had written what is called an insertion order. It’s a document that lays out for a media buyer — the company that actually places the ads — exactly what a campaign should look like.

Blue Chip stated in its insertion order that all the ads should be preroll, generally meaning the kind that run before a piece of video content — a sitcom on NBC.com, for instance. Ms. VanHeirseele wanted most of the videos to be on the large side, about 6 inches by 5 inches on a standard desktop computer. All were to be user-initiated, meaning that a viewer had to click on something to start the ad; none were to run on auto-play.

Is that what Blue Chip got? Oddly enough, it wasn’t sure. “You’d ask a media company where an ad was running and they’d say, ‘We can’t pull that list,’ ” Ms. VanHeirseele said. “Or they would give you a massive list but you had no way of telling if it was accurate.”

Stories like this are what’s holding back an even more significant investment in online video advertising as we head into the midterm elections. In fact, we’ve seen more than one traditional media firm circulating stories like this in a bid to secure a near-total lock on campaign persuasion media budgets.

What the story largely overlooks is that marketers and agencies now have the tools to prevent their ads from running on low-quality sites. The scenario outlined above — signing an insertion order, and then relying on middlemen for reporting or for a site list — is not how knowledgeable agencies buy media, and it’s not how the industry should operate moving forward.

Programmatic buying platforms allow agencies and their partners a greater level of control of how their ads are seen. We exercise this control for every campaign we run. Does the video autoplay or not? Is it skippable? Is it above or below the fold? Is the sound on or off? By doing our due diligence upfront, we can ensure best brand experience for every advertiser.

Analytics also allows us to further refine whether or not a given site or placement is accurately representing itself. If the video completion rate is much higher for a political ad on a non-political site than it is on a political site for the same kind of inventory, we know something is wrong. The same goes for abnormally high completion rates on skippable inventory. Finally, does a given placement show extremely high available inventory, yet it almost never registers impressions when shown to online cookie universes tied to individual voters? These are just some of the questions we look at during and after each campaign.

Finally, a variety of third party video measurement solutions allow you to double check what your video platform of choice is telling you. These include DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Sciences, Vindico, and VideoVerify from Mixpo.

This is an important discussion to be having, which is why the Interactive Advertising Bureau has been moving forward on a viewable impression standard, which is rolling out for video on June 30th.

The bottom line: The right approach, combined with the right technology, and the right standards, can ensure that advertisers avoid paying for digital video ads that are not seen.

Finally, it’s important to remember the enormous value that digital video continues to provide against even the most generous assessment of the cost of a reaching a voter in television. Agencies that exercise direct control over digital video buys through programmatic platforms can get a targeted voter to watch an ad for less than a penny, or a $10 CPM.

How does this compare to TV? The CPM cost of spot TV for all households can range from $8.03 for all households to $33.85 in primetime. And that’s before you narrow down the universe of people you need to reach. The last Republican primary in North Carolina saw fewer than 900,000 votes cast. This works out to one primary vote cast per 4.27 television households, moving the effective CPM on a primary voter video ad impression on TV up to a range between $34 and $144 depending on time of day. That’s an average of 7 times what digital video can look like.

Considering that more than $6.3 million has been spent on TV in today’s North Carolina primary, campaigns and outside collectively had the opportunity to save millions. For candidates specifically, whose voices have largely been crowded out on TV by outside groups, the opportunity to preserve their voice through more targeted channels is especially great. And all advertisers can benefit from a strategy that fully funds more efficient voter outreach first, relieving the enormous pressure on necessary but expensive TV budgets.