Australia's media agencies prioritising viewability
Although it is expected to improve this year, ad viewability for Australia's media agencies allegedly remains lower than in many other countries. A Media Quality Report is said to show that for Q1 2016 programmatic advertising had a higher risk of brand safety issues compared to ads booked through agencies, with an, albeit reduced, 11.6% risk of ad placements on explicit sites. To counteract this, many media agencies are making viewability a priority with some launching their own client offerings based on how many viewable impressions an ad receives.

We’re still not very safe when it comes to brand risk says a new report from verification company Integral Ad Science. In fact, Australia has a higher than average rate of ads ending up on porn sites and places with highly offensive language.

The Media Quality Report is for the first quarter of this year and shows programmatic advertising continues to have a higher risk of brand safety issues compared to ads booked by agencies.

The report takes into account a number of media metrics to determine an overall score. The metrics include brand safety, viewabiltiy, ad fraud, ad clutter and enhanced video metrics. They’re collated in a TRAQ (true advertising quality) score. The lower the score, the more at risk you are.

And Australia’s score is 565. This is compared to UK’s 581, the US’s 604, Germany’s 632 and France’s 681. It means the potential risk of ad placement in naughty sites (which still make up three quarters of whoopsie placements) is rated at 11.6 per cent. Germany’s is 9.9 per cent, the US is 9.1 per cent, the UK is 7 per cent and France is down at 6.9 per cent.

Still, it’s an improvement from the same report at the end of last year, as the risk was 13 per cent in Q4 2015.

Viewability – having half the ad in vision for at least one second – is up as a whole, but Australia still remains lower than many other countries.

“It’s great to see we are improving on a number of measures, but we are still a long way behind other nations,” said James Diamond, Integral Ad Science’s managing director.

“I believe the lower scores reflect a lower level of attention given to these metrics and with more tracking and greater adoption of measurement technologies like IAS’s Edge platforms we can expect to see these figures continue to improve”.

Viewability continues to remain a priority for many media agencies. While industry body for digital advertising, the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau), says we don’t have the technologies in place to properly start trading on just viewable impressions, many media agencies are side-stepping this approach and launching their own client offerings for viewability. Check out the current landscape here.

While the report from Integral Ad Science makes for rather dire reading, Australia is good at combatting ad fraud.

Only 4.3 per cent of online ad traffic in Australia is classified as invalid – whereas in the UK it’s 5 per cent, Germany is 5.9 per cent, France is 7.7 per cent and the US is 8.3 per cent.