As we kick off the new year, let’s take a look at some of the most surprising predictions found in our 2021 Industry Pulse.

Surprise #1 The Accelerated Rise of Connected TV and OTT

Like any good list, we’re starting with a technicality. With more consumers at home than ever before, it’s no surprise that connected TV (CTV) and OTT skyrocketed in the last year. This rise in adoption has been paired with a rise in ad spend. In the Industry Pulse, nearly 9 in 10 respondents said that advancements in digital video/OTT and CTV technology will accelerate the shift in ad spending from linear TV to digital.

However, the sudden jump in priority from 2020 to 2021 caught our attention this year.  In 2020, CTV was ranked as the 4th highest priority for digital professionals surveyed in the Industry Pulse. This year, digital video/OTT (57%) was the highest industry priority, followed closely by CTV (54%). In the span of only a year, digital video/OTT and CTV have become the new standard for reaching consumers as they stay at home. This rise in prioritisation will be met with an increased allocation of resources. 

As consumers continue to stay home, media consumption devices will continue to gain importance to meet growing needs.

Surprise #2: The Deprecation of the Cookie 

As the industry continually changes, digital precedents are routinely replaced with new and improved technologies. Nearly half (49%) of industry professionals stated the top industry challenge for 2021 was third party cookie deprecation. In response, tech giants like Google are actively looking to replace the cookie with new approaches to identity resolution. And while cookie deprecation has been anticipated for some time, the shift in focus comes alongside increased data privacy legislation implemented by governments around the globe. 

With cookie deprecation listed as a top challenge by industry professionals, it’s surprising only a third of respondents (29%) selected data privacy legislation when asked the same question. Despite being deprioritised as a challenge, data privacy legislation has the potential to continue greatly impacting the digital landscape. As data privacy becomes increasingly commonplace, marketers must continuously adapt and invest in new ways to accurately measure their digital campaigns.

Surprise #3 TikTok’s Future in 2021

One app that has had its fair share of popularity and attention is the social media platform, TikTok. However, when asked about which social platforms respondents would run ads or monetise content with this year, only 21% of respondents chose TikTok. Although this question was asked when the fate of TikTok was threatened by legislation, it’s surprising to see a low percentage of marketers planning to leverage the app in some capacity. This is especially unexpected, considering the scale of the TikTok user base. A new estimate forecasts that TikTok will top 1.2 billion active users by the end of 2021.

Whether TikTok witnesses increased ad growth likely hinges on advertisers’ ability to reach users and accurately measure success in campaigns, all while navigating privacy legislation.

Surprise #4 Marketers and Consumers Disagree on Brand Safety

Brands often align their priorities and tactics to complement or align with the needs and opinions of consumers. So, it’s surprising when brands and consumers disagree on a subject or priority.

In our November 2020 report, The Ripple Effect 2, we asked consumers who they thought was “most responsible for the type of content brands appear alongside.” In response, 51% said brands were most responsible. However, when we asked industry professionals who was “most responsible for mitigating brand risk,” 47% said publishers were most responsible, 39% said it was verification providers, and 38% said supply side platforms. 

Compared to consumers, only 24% of digital experts surveyed in the Industry Pulse thought brands were most responsible for mitigating brand risk. Whether it’s a gap in education or misplaced responsibility, marketers and consumers disagree on accountability for brand safety and suitability. While partners like verification providers play important roles in risk mitigation, consumers are ultimately looking to brands to control their content adjacencies. 

The Year Ahead 

There are always a few surprises in our Industry Pulse responses, and, as always, the this year will undoubtedly bring some developments no one could have predicted. But, when developing your marketing strategy, it’s important to account for the expected while remaining flexible to unexpected.

Download the 2021 Industry Pulse Report to read the less surprising, but equally compelling responses and predictions by industry experts. 

The post Industry Pulse 2021: The Most Unexpected Predictions appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

Brands needs to know that their ads are being viewed by real people – or risk losing the chance to improve ROI on media campaigns. Considering £17.6 billion was spent on shopping during the 2018 holiday season, according to eMarketer, the opportunity for marketers is huge.

But how do brands capitalise on this lucrative period? In the following blog post we recap the key takeaways from our recent Tricks of the Trade: 2019 Holiday Buying webinar. Within the webinar, we examine the media quality trends IAS observed during the 2018 holiday season and explain how to apply these learnings to your 2019 programmatic campaigns.

Based on IAS data, from 23 UK retailers between November 2018 and January 2019, we were able to deep dive into the 2018 holiday programmatic trends. Below we outline the key insights across impression volume, viewability and ad fraud and the tricks of the trade to make the most of this holiday season. Please note, with regards to brand safety, our data showed no seasonal differences and is therefore not included.

Impression volume

Volume peaks the day before Super Saturday – the last Saturday before Christmas and the busiest shopping day in the country. Following Super Saturday, impression volume starts to decline and levels off after New Year – as individuals celebrate, they browse fewer pages.

When considering device, both mobile and desktop impression volume patterns remain similar – however, mobile overtakes desktop at the weekends. Looking into video performance, volume levels remain high throughout December.

Tricks of the trade

1. Reach consumers via mobile in December – people are on-the-go ahead of Christmas and will be spending additional time on their mobile devices. This is a great opportunity to engage them with your brand
2. Beware of supply constraints around Christmas and New Year. If your brands expect an up-lift on these days, consider increasing your bid price
3. Implement separate trading strategies for display and video during December, as video viewing increases during this time

Ad fraud

Ad fraud has dropped slightly year on year, a trend we expect to continue as more campaigns shift towards programmatic, the adoption of ads.txt increases and more advanced machine learning models for fraud protection are created. However, fraud does and always will, spike during the holiday season.

Delving into device, UK desktop inventory is at a higher risk of ad fraud than mobile, yet mobile ad fraud rates are increasing, which can perhaps be attributed to an increasing value for mobile ads.

Another area at high risk of ad fraud is video, a highly valuable and therefore lucrative area for bad actors – last year we can see that ad fraud in video went up to almost 4% during New Years eve.

Tricks of the trade

1. Apply pre-bid fraud targeting in open auction & curated marketplaces. It is important as even if you get reimbursements for ad fraud from your partners, there’s a time cost to fraud for a marketer, especially during the holiday season
2. Leverage partners who protect against SIVT. Work with partners that invest in sophisticated anti-fraud detection and optimisation tools
3. Tap into quality video supply & work with trusted partners. It’s about quality as much as it is about quantity, especially around such peak periods. Favour working with trusted marketplaces and partners to ensure that your investment will give you the maximum return

Viewability

Viewability appears fairly consistent over the holiday season, hovering between 60-67%, an expected 5-10% dip, compared with the rest of the year. This is specifically prevalent during Black Friday and Super Saturday, when viewability can be up to 20% percentage points lower than the average IAS Media Quality benchmark. However, following the holidays when consumers are looking to return unwanted items, viewability starts to improve, hovering around 70%

Looking further into viewability, consumers appear to be watching more video when they are on vacation, as video viewability is consistently higher than desktop during this time. Mobile trends mirror consumer trends, with mobile viewability is generally lower than desktop.

Tricks of the trade

1. In order to protect increase the effectiveness of your programmatic campaigns fully make sure that you are leveraging a viewability solution that also considers fraud data and that is in real-time.
2. When it comes to mobile trends in viewability, it’s important to remember that this is 2018 data. With the improvements driven by the Open Measurement SDK and the advancements that it brought with regards to in-app viewability measurement, we can expect a more favourable output when we’ll run the analysis on 2019 data.

And so – in summary, the top three takeaways to consider when planning your holiday buying, are:

1. Beware of Super Saturday and implement pre-bid viewability targeting, to make the most of exposure at such peak consideration time
2. Focus on Video, as even if generally more expensive, it’s more likely to effectively influence consumer behaviour due to higher viewability rates
3. Capitalise on New Year’s Day viewing to drive exchanges instead of returns

For more information on the topics covered in this blog post, please visit:

• Why programmatic is on the up – UK Innovation Summit
• How Omnicom Media Group UK reduces brand risk and media waste for advertisers
• How to tell the difference between friend and fraud
• The checklist you need to fend off undesired traffic

The post Are you ready for the holidays? appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

IAS contributed its own proprietary SDK in 2017, which later became the OM SDK, unlocking the future of measuring viewability at scale. 

“This initiative has really proved the power of what we can do when we come together as an industry to solve complex challenges,” said Joseph Ranzenbach, Director of Product Management, IAS. 

“Google is one of the largest mobile in-app inventory providers in the world and its integration of the OM SDK notably scales the opportunity for advertisers seeking independent, third-party ad verification.”

The Open Measurement initiative, led by the IAB Technology Laboratory and Open Measurement Working Group, works to create a universal standard for app publishers to integrate and provide standardized measurement data for advertisers. 

To read the full announcement, please head to the IAS Website.

The post Google integrates OM SDK into their mobile in-app offering appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

Based on the UK ad revenues of 64 participants, plus additional recruitment sites and TV broadcasters, as reported by WARC, the latest IAB report paints a healthy digital picture. In 2018, UK advertisers spent £13.4bn on digital ads, an annual increase of £1.76bn and a 15% boost on 2017. Display ad spend is up 22% year-on-year, supporting display viewability figures within our recent H2 2018 Media Quality Report, which signaled an all-time high for UK desktop display viewability rates, reaching 68.8%, an improvement of 29.1% from the previous six months.

Moving towards mobile

Technological developments in both hardware and software, coupled with increasing internet speeds through the likes of 5G networks, are creating faster and more effective digital ecosystems. A natural fall out is mobile’s digital take over – the IAB results show that smartphone spend now accounts for a massive two thirds (66%) of total display ad spend.

As part of this, video ad spend has also grown and powered the majority of the growth in display spend. An engaging combination of auditory & visual stimulus, video is becoming one of the most effective means of capturing consumer attention. Marketers acted on this during 2018, with video ad spend now accounting for 44% of the total display market, making it the largest display format in the UK.

Video content is King

Video content is often consumed via social platforms – and within the IAB report, social media took a hefty chunk of the ad spend pie. Social revenue now totals £3.04bn, accounting for 23% of digital ad spend, an increase of 27% year on year – 58% of all display is being served in a social environment now. Unsurprisingly, 80% of social ad spend is spent on smartphones, whilst 57% of video budgets are invested in outstream, including social in-stream video. Social platforms still have some work to do, however – in our recent UK Industry Pulse report 70.2% of buy side respondents said that their social budgets will be impacted in 2019 without greater clarity into platforms. Social media platforms must act now, providing more meaningful insight into performance and measurement, or risk losing greater budget allocations.

What’s in store for 2019?

Looking into 2019, based on findings from IAS’s latest UK Industry Pulse report, lack of transparency, ad fraud and brand safety are most likely to impact the industry’s allocation of digital ad spend in 2019. Greater collaboration and increased transparency will help secure advertiser’s digital budgets this year and contribute to strengthening the whole digital ecosystem, enabling the healthy growth we have seen, continue.

However, as more brands adopt a video centric approach to their advertising campaigns, advertisers must be conscious of two things in particular. Firstly, the increased brand risk that accompanies video content. In order to mitigate the increased risk , advertisers should work with a brand safety vendor to monitor and block risky content to protect video spend. Secondly, advertisers must regularly analyse video data to ensure the most effective content is delivered. A third party, such as IAS, can provide clients with data driven insights on where spend is most effective, enabling advertisers to optimise their media buy.

The door of opportunity for advertisers to reach consumers, with quality content, is wide open. We can clearly see that consumers are more than willing to engage with video content and now is the time for brands to develop dynamic digital content strategies. Similarly, whilst advertisers continue to think mobile first, 2019’s digital spend figure is going to soar to new heights and we expect to see continued growth in video, but also see technology such as OTT and audio come into greater focus.

The post Mobile first marketers – What the IAB’s latest ad spend figures tell us appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

Download here: IAS UK Industry Pulse report, a deep dive into the trends, technologies, and priorities set to drive change across the UK’s digital advertising landscape in 2019.

From data privacy, fake news, through to social media and AI, the research highlighted a resounding call for better collaboration between agencies, brands and publishers, as well as greater transparency across the digital ecosystem. The key findings from our latest UK Industry Pulse report were:

Data privacy: the forefront focus

With the arrival of GDPR, data privacy has moved to become the top UK priority for the advertising industry – over half (55.5%) of all respondents felt data privacy was the top challenge for 2019, a significant 39% increase compared to the IAS Industry Pulse survey last year. It appears a sense of positivity towards the future of data protection has been instilled amongst UK respondents, nearly two-thirds (65.3%) said data privacy regulations improve business function. However, concerns do remain, with over half of respondents (61.2%) agreeing new regulations pose a significant threat to the entire digital advertising ecosystem. This mixed reaction to data privacy highlights a need for greater understanding of new and upcoming regulations and insight into how businesses will be impacted.

UK industry misalignment

When assessing the key priorities across the industry, we found distinct misalignment amongst UK respondents. Agency respondents agreed data privacy was the most pressing issue for 2019, brand respondents chose lack of consistent measurement across the entire media plan, whilst publishers opted for ad fraud.

Buy-side misalignment was further highlighted when looking at where future opportunities lie. Brands remain focused on multi-touch attribution and have begun to see greater opportunity in cross-device measurement. Over 2019, we expect to see more industry initiatives tackle measurement across the entire media plan – Unilever, for example, are beginning to show the possibilities of this.

In contrast to the brands, half of agency professionals (50%) surveyed are placing bets on AI and machine learning as the top future opportunity for digital advertising in the UK over the coming year.

Tighter collaboration and improved communication between all will be crucial this year if we are to successfully address key priorities such as consistent measurement and ad fraud head on.

Transitioning to transparency

Transparency was an overwhelming industry desire revealed in our research, with both brands and agencies calling for greater insight into the quality of digital media – specifically, 83.3% of brands perceived an overall lack of media quality transparency as the main threat to ad budget expenditure. Social media was also flagged, with more than eight out of ten (84%) of respondents noting that social platforms do not provide adequate transparency.

In a conclusive statement, seven out of ten (70.2%) of buy side respondents said that without greater clarity into social media platforms, their social budgets will be impacted in 2019. Social media platforms must act now, providing more meaningful insight into performance and measurement, or risk losing greater budget allocations. We have begun to see social platforms already begin to address the need for greater transparency, with the partnerships they are creating with third party measurement and verification companies. At IAS, we have recently announced our brand safety work with YouTube and our upcoming release with Facebook.

Opportunity of Amazon, AI and video

Overall, across the UK digital advertising industry, the greatest future opportunities were felt to be within video, AI and machine learning. Just over two fifths (41.1%) of respondents saw the future in video advertising, whilst 40.2% saw this in AI and machine learning.

When looking at platforms attracting larger ad budget allocation, Amazon was found to be set for a boost – with a majority (81.6%) of respondents believing Amazon will gain a larger portion of UK budgets in 2019. UK respondents are seeing that online consumers do not just visit the eCommerce giant to make a purchase; they also use it to discover and research relevant products. Amazon provides an attractive environment where consumers are ready to complete a purchase, making for an easy sell to buyers.

The UK Industry Pulse report clearly reflects the need for closer agency and brand collaboration, greater transparency into media quality, and wider understanding of data privacy regulations. To capitalise on the opportunities in 2019, the industry must work together to realise the true potential of digital advertising. Reaching the right audience, with the right message, at the right time on the right device is no mean feat, but by first finding agreement on the challenges ahead, in 2019 we have a chance to get closer than ever before.

Download here: IAS UK Industry Pulse report, a deep dive into the trends, technologies, and priorities set to drive change across the UK’s digital advertising landscape in 2019.

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