Dive Brief:
- DoubleVerify released its Global Insights 2017 Report that found media quality has the biggest negative impact on digital ad performance, per a press release.
- One key finding was that infected browsers have become a larger ad fraud problem than bots. The U.S. had the highest level of ad fraud at 6% by region, and video ad fraud hit 10%, 2x the level of display ad fraud.
- Another finding was brand safety remains an issue due to fake news with a DoubleVerify blocking 250% more ads from serving next to inflammatory in March compared with January of this year. Other regions including France and Italy also saw increases in blocked ads based around political and news content.
Dive Insight:
A positive takeaway from the report is ad viewability for both video and digital formats is improving, albeit slowly. Display viewability improved to 52% compared to 44% in 2015, and video viewability improved to 59% compared to 35% over the same time frame. The U.S. (51%) came second to Japan (54%) in video ad viewability.
Media quality and transparency has been big news this year, with major brands like P&G demanding both from digital ad partners. Transparency around media quality was cited as the “key to unlocking global digital ad performance” by Wayne Gattinella, CEO and president of DoubleVerify, in the press release, pointing to marketers demanding third-party measurement across all publishers, social media platforms and programmatic exchanges.
A concern for the industry could be the rise of infected browsers as the main source of ad fraud instead of bots. Bots create “ghost” browsing sessions, but ad fraud involving infected browsers means active browser sessions are being manipulated, making fraud harder to detect and avoid. The shift comes at a time when the industry has been actively battling ad fraud bots indicating ad fraud criminals are working to stay a step ahead.