Integral Ad Science

RESEARCH: The Attention Payoff

IAS Team — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 13:00:00 +0000

Exploring the perception and future outlook of attention measurement and optimization in digital media

All eyes are on attention. Although it’s one of the most widely discussed topics in digital media, marketers remain divided on how to properly harness it. Attention scores, methodologies, and key performance indicators are increasingly diversified — so how can marketers best measure and optimize their campaigns for higher attention?

IAS partnered with YouGov to assess the current state, perceptions, and future outlook of attention measurement and optimization in digital media. In this study, we surveyed U.S. digital media experts from both the buy- and sell-side to reveal the most important KPIs tracked by attention users and shed light on the business results and success rates attributed to attention strategies.

Here’s what we discovered:

83% of media experts think it’s important for their company to have an attention strategy
79% of media experts report substantial improvement in revenue opportunity since implementing an attention strategy
78% of attention measurement users are prepared to evolve to optimization in the next 12 months

Download the research, The Attention Payoff, to uncover the current state of attention and understand how your brand can be measuring and optimizing it to reach superior results.

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IAS Brand Safety & Suitability on TikTok Reaches 50+ Markets Worldwide

IAS Team — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 13:00:00 +0000

IAS Total Media Quality for TikTok is global

In today’s tech-driven world, it’s more important than ever for marketers to engage with users and ensure their ads appear next to brand safe and suitable content on a global scale. That’s why IAS is expanding our TikTok Brand Safety & Suitability Measurement, as part of Total Media Quality for TikTok, to 21 more markets, for a total of 50+ supported markets globally.

Powered by our advanced machine learning and AI technology, IAS has scaled from seven to 50+ markets in just over a year to arm marketers with an increasingly comprehensive set of solutions to measure and optimize campaigns on TikTok. IAS brings end-to-end solutions to TikTok with optimization (pre-bid) and Total Media Quality measurement (post-bid), powered by our industry-leading multimedia technology and aligned to the GARM Brand Safety & Suitability framework.

IAS's Brand Safety & Suitability Measurement for TikTok gives marketers:

Global coverage across 50+ markets for complete confidence in your TikTok media strategy
Sophisticated tech to accurately classify the feed with industry-leading multimedia technology, which combines image, audio, and text at scale
Trusted, third-party measurement of the content your ads appear adjacent to in the TikTok feed
Clear insights with industry-aligned safety and suitability reporting aligned to the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) categories and floor

Download the one sheet to learn about how IAS leads the industry in providing end-to-end support for marketers on TikTok — worldwide.

*To note, IAS TikTok optimization solutions are currently available in select markets.

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WHITE PAPER: Quest for Quality

IAS Team — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 11:59:00 +0000

How marketers can drive superior results on the programmatic supply path

Programmatic is dominating the ad buying space. With benefits like targeting, scaling, and operational efficiencies, it’s no wonder why programmatic appeals to the marketing masses. But despite its features, programmatic ad buying is complicated. It poses significant challenges for marketers, like opaque, complex, and cost inefficient supply paths. And unfortunately, traditional supply path optimization (SPO) products leave marketers with wasted ad spend and a lack of transparency into the quality of impressions being served.

Without transparency into the cost and quality of programmatic ads, marketers are at risk of wasting valuable ad spend on low quality media that doesn’t drive results.

IAS’s latest white paper, Quest for Quality, deep dives into Quality Path Optimization (QPO) to help marketers overcome programmatic buying challenges so they can truly understand the tools they need to drive ROI and performance on the programmatic supply path.

In this white paper, you’ll learn:

Why making supply path decisions on cost alone is hurting brands
How to identify inefficiencies along the supply path while taking impression quality and transparency into account
How IAS’s Total Visibility is helping marketers across the globe improve campaign performance and ROI

Don’t compromise the quality of your impressions. Only IAS shows marketers the true financial impact of media quality on the supply path. Download the white paper, Quest for Quality, now to access these insights and more.

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What is Programmatic Advertising?

IAS Team — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 21:12:07 +0000

The number of online consumers is rapidly growing, and so is the need for ads that capture attention and make an impact. It’s crucial that marketers can depend on a transparent and trustworthy ad publishing process to reach consumers online and drive results without wasting time or money.

That’s where programmatic advertising comes in.

What is programmatic advertising?

Programmatic advertising is the automated buying and selling of ad space in real-time. This process lets marketers target specific audiences and optimize their campaigns for better, scalable results.

One of the main benefits of programmatic advertising is that it eliminates the need for manual buying and selling, helping to increase time efficiency and avoid human error. Through technology-driven processes, like algorithms and AI, programmatic advertising helps streamline both the purchasing and placement of ads across the digital landscape. Plus, programmatic advertising is flexible, allowing media buyers to shift budgets faster than ever before.

How does programmatic advertising work?

The programmatic supply path is made up of a number of intermediaries that connect advertisers (buyers) to publishers (sellers) to buy and sell ad inventory across digital environments, including open web, social media, CTV, and more.

Ad inventory is managed through demand-side platforms (DSPs) and sell-side platforms (SSPs). DSPs help advertisers buy digital ad inventory through automation, while SSPs compete for advertising demand within programmatic auctions and automate the sale of advertising space for publishers.

How does programmatic advertising help marketers?

Programmatic advertising helps marketers make the most of every cent and every second. By using precise targeting and real-time optimization, marketers can improve the efficiency of their campaigns and reach their audiences with individualized ads to engage and enhance brand visibility.

Programmatic advertising also helps marketers budget their ad spend to ensure that their campaigns are maximizing ROI and reaching other KPIs. Programmatic advertising analyzes metrics and insights, giving marketers real-time transparency so they can refine their targeting strategies and ad placements to drive superior results.

How can IAS help?

The programmatic supply path can be a bit complex, so marketers need the most efficient buys and the fastest campaign optimization. IAS helps verify that your buys are made of Quality Impressions, which measures whether your ads are in-view, seen by a real person, in a brand safe and suitable environment, and in the correct geo. IAS also works to ensure the integrity of your brand and optimize your campaign effectiveness throughout every step of the supply path.

Here’s a quick look at what IAS can offer with our industry-leading programmatic product suite:

Optimization Pre-Bid Segments: Achieve optimal media quality results, hit KPIs, and ensure your ads are seen by real people in safe environments with real-time data.
Performance-Based Targeting: Apply Context Control optimization that lets you target contextually relevant content that aligns with your strategic objectives and amplifies your brand message.
Total Visibility: Activate more efficient campaigns, protect your spend, and deliver better ROI with the industry’s first Quality Path Optimization (QPO) product, Total Visibility, which combines DSP log level data, financial, and supply path information with IAS media quality data to provide marketers with insight into the supply path, performance, quality, and cost of programmatic ads.
Automated Tag: Spend less time tagging and more time optimizing with our first-to-market tag management solution that gives you greater operational efficiencies with increased control of the campaign set-up process.

Drive results on your programmatic campaigns with actionable transparency and precise targeting that only IAS can provide. Check out our programmatic product suite to get started today.

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What is CTV and Expert CTV Advertising Tips

IAS Team — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 18:08:50 +0000

Connected TV’s (CTV) meteoric rise has revolutionized the way viewers watch and consume entertainment media. 60% of U.S. households own a CTV device, and CTV usership is expected to surpass 242 million users in the U.S. alone by 2026. As the home entertainment landscape expands, lucrative advertising opportunities will continue to emerge. However, with any successful advertising platform comes threats to your brand — from both external bad actors and risky content that lives on CTV platforms.

What is CTV?

Ever watched your favorite show on a Smart TV? If yes, then you’ve used a CTV device. CTV is any TV device that is connected to the internet and enables users to stream premium content through apps, like Netflix or Hulu.

A few examples of CTV devices include Apple TV and Roku, but they can also include set-top boxes and gaming consoles like Amazon Fire TV, Xbox, and PlayStation.

What is CTV advertising?

CTV advertising refers to video ads that are shown to viewers while they stream their favorite movies and TV shows. This type of programmatic advertising allows for highly accurate audience targeting and in-depth measurement of media quality metrics like viewability, invalid traffic, brand safety, and more.

CTV ad breaks are structured similarly to traditional TV ad breaks, with ads served around and within a show in time-based ad pods. However, on CTV, advertisers typically have access to more data, which enables them to be much more granular in their targeting.

More and more audiences watch free streaming services, making CTV ads more important than ever. CTV advertising plays a significant role in keeping some CTV platforms free for viewers. Without the revenue that comes from CTV ad purchases, many streaming platforms wouldn’t be able to offer free content for their audiences.

The advantages of advertising on CTV

CTV advertising is highly unique. It combines the impact of traditional TV (also known as linear) advertising with the advanced capabilities of modern digital advertising — so you can reach your desired audience in the right place at the right time.

Top 4 benefits of CTV ads:

Rich CTV data enables marketers to precisely target audiences based on age, gender, location, purchase behavior, and more — maximizing engagement and ROAS.
CTV allows brands to reach broader swaths of consumers, including those who have parted ways with traditional cable TV (“cord-cutters”) and those who never used it (“cord-nevers”).
CTV boasts high video completion rates, as it’s typically not possible for viewers to skip CTV ads
Ad campaigns on CTV are trackable in near real-time thanks to an abundance of first and third party data.

But CTV ads aren’t inherently protected

As with any digital environment, CTV’s terrain isn’t all smooth. Video ad inventory is especially susceptible to fraud, brand risk, and being out-of-view.

In the current fragmented CTV ecosystem, there is a greater risk of fraudulent activity than ever before. Plus, CTV’s expansive ecosystem contains a wide variety of content that could either be unrelated to your brand or damaging to your brand’s image. Having your ads delivered in either of these types of environments can result in wasted ad spend at best and, at worst, permanent damage to your brand’s reputation.

For example, adult content apps are available across most CTV devices; there could also be violent video content, or movie and TV scenes that are in direct conflict with what’s suitable for a specific brand (like a home rental company brand ad running right after a home break-in scene).

Protect your CTV ads with IAS

As CTV adoption continues to skyrocket, so will the risks that come with CTV ads. That’s where IAS comes in.

IAS works directly with some of the largest streaming platforms to deliver the most actionable data available on CTV. With granular post-bid measurement and pre-bid optimization segments, marketers can better understand their investments and ensure they bid only on valid inventory across streaming platforms.

But we don’t stop there. With the acquisition of Publica in 2021, IAS gained the unique ability to provide CTV streaming publishers and platforms with the ad serving technology to run unified auctions and build seamless ad breaks, enabling sell-side partners to grow their advertising revenues and improve their viewers’ streaming experiences.

If your brand is advertising on CTV, media quality is a must. Reach out to an IAS representative or click here to learn more about how IAS helps you protect your brand, improve ROI, and increase efficiencies on CTV.

The post What is CTV and Expert CTV Advertising Tips appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

HP Drives Attention and Results with IAS and Lumen Research

IAS Team — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 21:23:40 +0000

IAS data shows that in-view ads amplify attention

IAS partnered with Lumen Research to understand the correlation between viewability and attention for technology brand HP. In this case study, IAS and Lumen Research examined the impact of media quality and attention across HP’s campaign, measuring the attention each ad received by combining Lumen Research’s focus data — which features eye tracking — with IAS’s viewability data.

Here’s what we found:

11.5x increase in attention scores for in-view ads compared to out-of-view ads
3x increase in success events with higher attention scores
70% lower cost per success event with higher attention scores

Media quality gets attention, and attention gets results. Download the case study now to learn more about how viewability can be a key driver of attention for your brand.

To learn more about how IAS and Lumen Research are bringing cutting-edge eye tracking technology and predictive attention models to the market, click here.

The post HP Drives Attention and Results with IAS and Lumen Research appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

How Marketers Can Detect and Avoid Made For Advertising Sites

IAS Team — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 12:00:57 +0000

Have you ever clicked on a link to an article with a clickbait-y headline such as “Shocking secrets of the pharaohs!” or “You won’t believe how much these actors make!” and been redirected to a page littered with ads? If so, you’ve visited a made-for-advertising (MFA) site.

MFA sites have existed since the advent of programmatic advertising and have historically been referred to as “clickbait sites” or “ad farms.” Unlike premium ad-supported sites with quality journalism, MFA sites exist solely to serve ads. MFA sites are low quality sites with a terrible user experience, which reflects poorly upon the brands that advertise on them. Research from Jounce Media and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) has shown that advertising on MFA sites doesn’t drive meaningful campaign results, like conversions and brand lift, and is a waste of ad spend.

Biometric research conducted by IAS, The Ripple Effect, highlights the risk for brands advertising on low quality sites:

81% of U.S. consumers find it annoying when a brand appears next to low quality content
Of those consumers, 52% feel less favorably toward a brand that does this
62% will stop using the brand altogether if its ads appear adjacent to low quality content

Why do MFA sites exist?

Simply put, MFA sites make their publishers a lot of money. MFA publishers practice arbitrage advertising—they place ads across content recommendation platforms on a pay-per-click basis and monetize the resulting traffic by serving a ton of ads. It’s a very simple and effective model, and completely legal.

MFA site operators, for the most part, are not purchasing bot traffic. Real people are visiting these sites, so their model is not driven by invalid traffic. Many MFA sites use plagiarized or AI-generated content instead to engage with users.

How have MFA sites avoided detection?

MFA sites have flown under the radar for years because they’re highly optimized and purpose-built to perform well against traditional ad verification metrics—especially viewability. MFA sites tend to be fraud-free, brand safe, contextually relevant, and, given they stack ad placements above-the-fold, have above average viewability rates.

In an effort to avoid detection, MFA sites take unusual steps not taken by premium publishers. For example, the look-and-feel of the site can be completely different to a visitor depending on how they got to the site. If the visitor was directed to the site after clicking on a link promoted by a content recommendation platform, they’ll see the site littered with ads. However, if the user visits the site directly, they will see very few ads, and sometimes no ads on the homepage. MFA publishers do this to pass audits when partners inspect the quality of their sites.

MFA sites are not operated in silos, they are operated in large, coordinated networks. A publisher will own many MFA sites and will rotate traffic across their sites. They will also share content across these sites. Once the publisher notices a decrease in bidding activity on a given site (due to buyers putting the site on exclusion lists), they will move traffic to another site. They may even temporarily shut down the site and relaunch it again in the future.

It’s like a game of whack-a-mole.

What are the qualities and attributes of MFA sites?

The ANA, along with the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As), the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA), recently published a list of characteristics associated with MFA sites:

High ad-to-content ratio
- Usually at least twice the Internet average, e.g., ad-to-content ratio of more than 30% for desktop
Rapidly auto-refreshing ad placements
- Numerous refreshing banner ads
- Autoplay video ads flood the site
- Slide shows forcing visitors to click through multiple pages to access content, with multiple ads
High percentage of paid traffic sourcing
- MFA publishers often have little-to-no organic audience and are instead highly dependent on visits sourced from clickbait ads that run on social networks, content recommendations platforms, and even on the websites of reputable publishers. Buying paid traffic is the primary cost driver of operating an MFA business. Overcoming paid traffic acquisition costs requires MFA publishers to engage in aggressive monetization practices and arbitrage
Generic content (non-editorial or templated, low-quality content)
- Often syndicated, dated and non-unique (articles regurgitated)
Usually poorly designed, templated website designs

How can IAS help?

IAS’s new MFA measurement product leverages AI to identify MFA sites. It supports the definition above, and goes beyond this list of characteristics to effectively identify MFA sites.

The IAS MFA product completed alpha testing in early October 2023, and is available now as a beta measurement offering for select customers. General availability is expected to expand to all customers in early 2024.

For more information, check out our press release and reach out to your IAS representative.

The post How Marketers Can Detect and Avoid Made For Advertising Sites appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

Analyze performance metrics alongside financial and media quality insights with Total Visibility’s Performance Dashboard

IAS Team — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 11:59:00 +0000

How to get seamless transparency into your media quality inventory

IAS has enhanced Total Visibility to include a new performance dashboard in IAS Signal, providing even greater transparency into the programmatic supply path.

As media budgets are cut, advertisers are under more scrutiny to prove how media quality investments help drive results. IAS’s Total Visibility enables advertisers to get a singular view of their programmatic campaigns’ performance that includes media quality, media cost, supply path, and now, performance metrics—all in one place. Recent IAS analysis has shown that optimizing towards Quality Impressions can result in an 11% increase in conversion rate.

With IAS’s new Performance Dashboard in IAS Signal, you can access metrics including:

Success Rate Over Time to prove the long-term value of quality media on campaign performance
Cost per Action to understand which programmatic supply paths are driving conversions efficiently
Conversion Rate to power marketing decisions based on industry-leading media quality data

Access seamless transparency between media quality and performance today. Download the one sheet to get started.

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RESEARCH: Brand Safety in India – A Consumer Report

IAS Team — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 09:58:29 +0000

Brand safety remains a priority for marketers across the globe. Between a rapidly evolving media landscape and booming content growth, marketers are increasingly invested in protecting their brand’s reputation and allocating media budgets toward content that minimises the risk to their brand.

The objective of this study is to uncover what Indian consumers regard as brand safe/unsafe content and also to understand the impact the ad environment has on their perceptions of brands and their advertising.

The report looks at three specific areas:

Appropriate and inappropriate content
Perceptions of Brands and Advertising
Safety in Journalism and News

Key Takeaways include:

93% of Indian consumers say that it is important to them that the content surrounding online ads is appropriate
85% of Indian consumers say that brands are responsible for the content surrounding their ads
90% of Indian consumers say it is important to them that ad funding supports responsible journalism

Download the full research report here today

The post RESEARCH: Brand Safety in India – A Consumer Report appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

Case Study: How IAS Pre- & Post-Bid improves conversion rates & overall media placements

IAS Team — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 14:39:56 +0000

The Challenge

As a leader in the financial services industry, UM’s client values transparency, performance, and efficiency. UM Taiwan was interested in activating pre-bid segments for viewability and brand suitability to impact their client’s key performance metrics: click-through-rate (CTR) and conversion rate.

UM Taiwan wanted to achieve higher brand safety performance, reduce fail rates, and ensure the highest media quality standards across their client’s six month programmatic campaigns. UM Taiwan, needed actionable insights and data-driven recommendations for their client to activate on their preferred DSP platforms for their six months. UM was looking for real-time signals of their client’s performance in order to help them efficiently optimise their campaigns before placing bids in potentially unsuitable environments.

UM Taiwan needed a trusted global measurement and optimisation partner to help execute their client’s goals:

Improve Brand Safety Pass Rate
Improve CTR and Conversion Rates
Increase Viewability Rates

UM Taiwan partnered with IAS to identify the value and efficiency opportunities in utilizing our pre-bid product for major financial advertiser.

Overall Outcome

IAS and UM aligned on a custom pre-bid strategy to generate a seamless activation process based on their client’s post-bid settings. The client enabled three IAS pre-bid solutions: Brand Safety, Context Control Avoidance, and Viewability across their programmatic campaigns from January to June 2023.

IAS helped reduce UM’s client brand suitability fail rate, which resulted in delivering quality impressions in safe and suitable environments. Ultimately, the client witnessed performance uplifts across their KPIs and achieved a 183% improvement in conversion rate.

The major financial advertiser is now able to make confident brand safety decisions across their programmatic media investments thanks to IAS’s actionable data.

Download the Case Study in full today

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