H2 2017 ANZ Media Quality Report

Every month IAS analyses hundreds of billions of impressions globally. These impressions span across every channel and platform from desktop and mobile to video and walled garden social platforms. We evaluate these impressions for viewability, potential ad fraud, and brand safety. Our bi-annual media quality report aggregates those findings to present the clearest possible picture of media quality in Australia and New Zealand.

The Media Quality Report from H2 2017, based on this analysis of over 500 billion impressions, is designed to empower stakeholders across the digital advertising landscape to invest their marketing dollars with greater confidence by illustrating the state of online inventory today.

The first half of 2017 saw the industry bring increased effort to addressing media quality concerns. These efforts were essential for brands, agencies, publishers, and tech platforms, for whom media quality and transparency are critical to ensuring that digital campaigns are driving optimal value in viewable, safe and fraud-free environments. The H2 2017 Media Quality Report reflects the first outcomes of these efforts to improve quality and mitigate waste.

The latest version of the media quality report captures the impact changes that roiled digital marketing in 2017. The results point to challenges and opportunities for improvement, but the overarching story is one of cooperation. The report shows both the impact of collective action the areas of opportunity for industry-wide collaboration.

Australian brands continue to face brand risk
The report reveals that between H1 and H2 2017, overall desktop brand risk in Australia increased by 14.4% from 7.2% to 8.2% across publisher direct and programmatic buys. Nearly 4 in 10 impressions that served on unsafe web pages in Australia appeared alongside violent content. The proportion of publisher direct desktop display risk within the violence category increased from 36.1% of total risk in H1 2017 to 55.9% in H2 2017. This increase may be due to an influx of premium publisher coverage of violent incidents, which is classified as moderate risk. Impressions considered to pose a moderate risk to brands increased by 17.0% from H1 to H2 2017.

With industry efforts, Australia has improved significantly in viewability
Australia has higher desktop display viewability levels compared to the global average. Overall viewability increased from 52.6% in H1 to 57.2% in H2 2017, which is on trend with improving desktop display viewability numbers, globally. In the U.S., overall viewability is 54.7% and in the UK, it is 53.3%.

Fraud risk is on the rise
Compared with the U.S., Australia lower fraud rates.  However, non-optimised fraud increased from 5.4% in H1 to 7.7% in H2 2017, which means that fraud risk is on the rise in Australia. Fraud rates for campaigns optimised against fraud remained relatively flat, showing optimisation efforts are paying off by keeping fraud rates low.

First New Zealand data
Compared to Australia, New Zealand has nearly 46% (0.2% vs. 0.4%), fewer fraudulent impressions on desktop display. This difference is likely attributable to the relatively small size of the market.

Compared to Australia, New Zealand has 28.4% less total risk on desktop display. Similar to Australia, the majority of the risk in New Zealand is in the violence category which comprised 55%, or over half of overall risk. New Zealand trails Australia on desktop display viewability by 48.7% vs. 57.2%.  This is in part because, compared to Australia, the market has more recently become focused on improving overall viewability.

To learn more, and to see all the H2 2017 Media Quality benchmarks in Australia and New Zealand, fill out the form to download the report.