Integral Ad Science (IAS) has released the 16th edition of the Media Quality report and given insight into the performance and quality of Australian digital media, alongside global comparisons.
The report provides highlights into ad fraud, viewability, time in view, brand risk and ad completion rates.
Australia has the highest mobile web display viewability rate globally and desktop video viewability reached the 80% mark for the first time, according to the report.
Viewability rates in Australia rose across all environments. Mobile web display remained one of the most viewable formats globally, reporting a 73.0% viewability rate in H2 (July to December) 2021, increasing 4.2 percentage points (pp), while the worldwide viewability rate reached 65.6%.
Mobile web video viewability rates were at 77.4%, a whopping increase of 10.4pp year-on-year (YoY). Mobile app display viewability rose to 77.4%, slightly below the worldwide average of 77.6%.
The rise in viewability rates on mobile environments is likely supported by the growing adoption of the IAB Tech Lab’s Open Measurement Software Development Kit (OM SDK). The viewability rates for desktop video touched the 80% mark for the first time ever (80.6%) with the desktop display at 72.4%
The report also found that Australia has the highest desktop video ad fraud rates globally.
While desktop video became one of the most viable formats in Australia (80.6%), it also witnessed an increase in ad fraud rates, which saw an optimised against-ad fraud rate of 2.9%.
In comparison, the worldwide average remained at 1.3%. Desktop display ad fraud rates in Australia were 1.4%, with ad-fraud rates on mobile web display and mobile web video at 0.4%.
IAS also measured brand risk global as the portion of pages scored by IAS as medium or higher risk to brands.
Brand risk rates dipped to historically low levels in H2 2021. This shift was powered by the growing adoption of sophisticated contextual solutions, increasing privacy regulations, and the positive impact contextual alignment brings to the consumer advertising experience.
Desktop display registered one of Australia’s lowest brand risk levels (0.7%), while the worldwide average remained at 1.4%. Australia had the second-lowest brand risk on desktop video globally (0.8%), down from 3.6% YoY. Mobile web display reported 1.0% brand risk levels, down from 4.2% YoY, and mobile web video at 1.2%, down 3.4pp YoY.
Jessica Miles, country manager ANZ at IAS, said: “Marketers are considering safety and suitability as they adapt to the changing environment. Privacy compliant, contextual targeting, and avoidance, which incorporate sentiment, are deployed to drive audience engagement in high-quality environments.
“We can see this impact in the significant drop in brand risk across all media buying types. Brand risk is a critical metric to consider and can directly impact brand equity.”
She continue: “Conversely, we have seen an increase in ad fraud across video, and it comes as no surprise, as the video has grown 47.8% year-on-year, according to the IAB OAER, December 2021 Report.
“Programmatic media quality targeting facilitates buying quality impressions while reducing wastage, a key strategy marketers can deploy to combat the increasing fraud levels across the video. As we emerge from the past year’s challenges and with the huge shift to programmatic, there is a greater focus on efficiency.
“As marketers, we’ve learned that minimising wastage by reducing brand risk and ad fraud, coupled with deploying advanced, privacy-compliant targeting strategies like Contextual Targeting is a viable solution for driving efficiencies, engagement, and ROI,” she added.
Jessica Miles