IAS Media Quality Report Says Ad Fraud On The Rise, Risk In Decline

Integral Ad Science (Nasdaq: IAS), a global leader in digital media quality, today released its seventeenth edition of the Media Quality Report for H1 2022, providing transparency into the performance and quality of digital media in the Asia Pacific region, alongside global comparisons.

This report explores how media quality has evolved over the past six months and how marketers can use these shifts to maximise future campaign performance.

Invalid traffic (IVT) activity increased almost universally. APAC was no exception; most markets in the region saw an increase in ad fraud across desktop display, with Singapore having the highest annual increase of 1.9 percentage points year-on-year (YoY) and overall ad fraud rate at 4.9 per cent in H1 2022. Japan and Vietnam followed with respective ad fraud rates of 3.3 per cent (an increase of 0.7 percentage points YoY) and 3.1 per cent (an increase of 1.6 percentage points YoY).

Desktop display ad fraud rates also increased YoY in Australia (1.6 per cent) and New Zealand (0.7 per cent), but dropped slightly in India (0.8 per cent). Globally advertisers saw an average optimised-against-ad fraud rate of 1.4 per cent for desktop display; the non-optimised ad fraud rates reached 13.2 per cent.

Mobile web display environments remained safer in APAC than desktop display; even though there was an uptick in optimised ad fraud rates in a few markets, most of them remained lower than 1 per cent. Singapore saw optimised fraud rates of 0.9 per cent, Vietnam 0.5 per cent and Indonesia 0.4 per cent. India and New Zealand reported 0.2 per cent mobile display ad fraud rates, which did not change YoY.

On the other hand, on mobile web display ad fraud rates, Australia saw a marginal decline of 0.2 percentage points YoY to reach 0.4 per cent. Japan saw a decline of 0.6 percentage points YoY to reach 1.7 per cent.

Programmatic buys across mobile display impressions in Indonesia, Japan, Singapore and Vietnam had higher ad fraud rates than direct publisher buys.

Mobile campaigns using IAS technology saw decreased ad fraud rates in the region. Non-optimised ad fraud activity (affecting unprotected campaigns) increased at 10 times the pace of the jump observed for those running with protection (optimised). Globally, mobile campaigns running without anti-fraud protection encountered up to 16 times the amount of ad fraud as optimised-against-fraud rates.

Ad fraud follows ad dollars and higher CPMs. With the upcoming holiday buying season, advertisers must monitor and block fraudulent impressions and apply pre-bid solutions to offer additional protection against ad fraud when programmatically transacting ads.

Brand risk rates remained on a downward trajectory as the adoption of context-based strategies continues to evolve. Indonesia saw one of the steepest brand risk reductions, down 3.7 percentage points on desktop display and 3.3 percentage points on mobile web display.

Despite a slight annual increase, Vietnam had one of the lowest brand risk levels globally on mobile web display (0.8 per cent). Brand risk levels on mobile web display across APAC markets remained lower than the worldwide average of 2.3 per cent.

Across the world, the brand risk for display ad buys was often driven by the violence category; the same trend followed in Australia, Indonesia and Singapore. Still, illegal downloads represented the largest portion of brand risk for Vietnam, while for India, the primary threat was offensive language.

This highlights the importance of advertisers frequently revisiting brand suitability and safety strategies and having an always-on approach for their campaigns.

Barring Japan, all APAC markets saw an uptick in viewability in display environments, with Australia registering the highest viewability level at 74.6 per cent an increase of 2.9 percentage points YoY. Japan reported the lowest desktop display viewability at 48.4 per cent compared to the global average of 71.5 per cent. The other APAC markets reported more than 60 per cent viewability rates.

Viewability on mobile app environments has also benefited from increased adoption of the IAB Tech Lab’s Open Measurement SDK and third-party access to measurement data. Regional brands understand that viewability is a prerequisite to attention, and viewability rates should be high before tackling attention.

Laura Quigley, SVP APAC at IAS said, “It’s encouraging to see improved digital media quality performance from emerging markets in the APAC region. Publishers are reviewing their inventory, re-designing their sites to deliver greater attention and viewability for clients, and implementing critical strategies to avoid risk and reduce fraud. Fraud is on the rise, and regional advertisers need to make sure we do not just monitor but also block fraud. The non-mitigated fraud rates could be 10 times higher than fraud rates where mitigation tactics are used.

“Advertisers must have robust pre-bid and post-bid strategies and deploy verification solutions to ensure that direct and programmatically traded impressions are protected and optimised to provide maximum impact and ROI.”

With barriers like GDPR and the impending deprecation of cookies, marketers are on a mission to connect with their audiences without invading their privacy. Contextual targeting is a privacy-friendly and effective method for advertisers to reach the right audience at the right time to drive outcomes. IAS classifies content with the greatest granularity at scale.

With emotional and sentiment analysis used in classifying content at the page level, marketers can rely on IAS Context Control to reach their target audience with greater precision and scale than traditional targeting tools. Additionally, IAS’s recent acquisition of Context will enable IAS to accelerate its roadmap to go beyond standard frameworks and to expand its capabilities into more social platforms and CTV.

This solution will enable sophisticated multimedia classification technology, including image, audio, and video. Download the full report here.