Industry leaders rank brand safety the most important media quality metric

Transparency, brand safety, accurate measurements: these are the industry’s biggest challenges, according to a recent survey of 816 digital media leaders by Integral Ad Science (IAS). The survey asked the digital leaders what they think are the greatest challenges and opportunities going into 2018.

Insights include:

• Everyone is talking about transparency. Brands want it, agencies want it and budget decision makers want it most of all. The survey revealed that 73.4 percent of budget decision makers view fraudulent impressions and 64.9 percent ads adjacent to risky content as “major threats to digital advertising budgets.”
• Bring on cross-device and programmatic opportunities. Despite the risk in programmatic advertising, 67.2 percent of brands and 58 percent of agencies believe that technologies that support it are critical to the future.
• Standardize measurements. Most (74.5 percent) agree that they are necessary but can’t gather consensus on what that standard should be with 48.9 percent saying they believe the Media Rating Council (MRC) standard of viewability is not stringent enough.

From the report:

“Big consumer data breaches in 2017 drove privacy concerns to the top of the list of challenges industry professionals faced last year, followed closely by ad blocking and the ongoing struggle with fraud.”

“Programmatic advertising continues to improve transacting, targeting, and reporting in digital advertising. However, increasing automation of the transacting process has led to increased media quality concerns around fraud, brand risk, and viewability.”

The survey asked publishers, agencies, and brands how they would price media in light of their concerns about transparency. Publishers indicated their preference for a straight or viewable CPM model, where buy-side professionals gravitated toward performance-based pricing such as a cost-per-click or cost-per-action.

The survey also found that fake news is a huge challenge, “not just the advertising industry, but also society as a whole.”