London, UK, 29th March 2017: The report released today, from Integral Ad Science (IAS), the technology and data company that empowers the advertising industry to effectively reach and influence consumers everywhere, reveals that video advertising outperformed desktop display for the first time. Most notably, video viewability showed significant improvement, increasing from 40% to 58.2% when comparing H1 2016 to H2 2016, while the completion rate in view increased from 26.7% to 35.1%.

Video brand risk – ads served next to content deemed inappropriate – improved compared to H1 2016, decreasing from 11.2% overall to 8.9%, which is on par with display brand risk, falling from 7.8% during the first half of 2016 to 6.8% during the second half of the year. However, with the advent of fake news and the increase in violent and extremist content and videos, brand safety remains a critical issue for advertisers, underscoring the need for a solution to protect brand reputations.

Nick Morley, EMEA MD, Integral Ad Science, comments: „The IAS Media Quality Report highlights the state of UK display advertising. Our findings help marketers to better understand their ability to invest in digital advertising.
Morley continues: “With the rise in discussions around fake news, ad fraud, and brand safety, marketers need to demand greater transparency. The recent headlines have increased awareness of these issues, highlighted clear areas where improvement is required, and reinforced that context is key. Everyone in the industry has a duty of care to address brand safety issues, we’d encourage all to do their part and use third party verification technology.”

When analysing rates of ad fraud, a stark difference was found between campaigns using ad fraud prevention and those that did not. For advertisers that are utilising prevention technology, ad fraud rates were found to be 0.3%, compared to 4.9% when no fraud prevention measures were taken. Additional key insights from the report show homepages are found to attract higher rates of ad fraud, 88% higher than article-specific pages.

For the first time, the H2 2016 report incorporates consumer level insights, revealing there is much work to be done. For most campaigns, the vast majority of consumers are underexposed, 70-85% of consumers are served no more than one viewable impression and 50-65% of consumers are exposed to the ads for a total of five seconds or less.

The H2 2016 UK Media Quality Report highlights ad fraud, brand safety, and viewability trends for programmatic and direct advertising across multiple platforms and is based on insights collected from over 100 billion ad impressions analysed globally between 1st July and 31st December 2016.

The full report can be viewed here.