In this op-ed, Jess Miles, Integral Ad Science’s country manager, explores the world of media quality and its impact on campaign performance and why it is more important than ever.

B&T’s Tom Fogden has recently published a compelling three–part series investigating the complicated world of programmatic advertising. A channel, which I agree, can be complex and difficult to navigate. Inspired by his in-depth exposé, I felt it was the perfect time to underscore the paramount importance of media quality.

By “quality,” I refer to more than just a viewable ad. It is about an advertisement appropriately positioned in the right context that resonates with an advertiser’s brand ethos, and most importantly, that can capture the human eye.

Media quality is the backbone of ad success, encapsulating each advert’s value and integrity and ensuring ad placements’ viewability, relevance, and safety. By channelling resources into high-quality media, advertisers can elevate campaign efficacy, maximise ROI, and foster more meaningful connections with their target audience.

It is often misunderstood how essential media quality is in digital advertising. But high media quality is not a proxy for campaign performance, and it should not be considered a luxury for campaigns that stand out for their high brand recall or low CPA. Quality is the critical foundation that allows advertising to be effective.

Since the 2000s, groundbreaking innovations such as Web 2.0 and social media have catalysed a new age. This era heralded a democratisation of the digital sphere, making it free and easy for anyone to broadcast their opinion online, at scale. The internet experienced a content boom, with a hefty portion comprising unmoderated, unregulated user-generated content (UGC). Information became a two-way street, no longer monopolised and carefully crafted by a handful of mass media conglomerates.

We now live in a time saturated with content, where advertisers must diversify their marketing budgets across multiple channels to engage their target audience effectively.

As the number of advertising channels increase, the need to drive transparency and consistency across these channels has never been more important. Technology is required to measure and classify this vast amount of impressions being uploaded at record speeds and consumed at even greater velocity. It is, therefore, essential to work with a partner like IAS that understands your brand’s business and values and can enable brands to enforce the same standards of quality and protection across all environments in a technologically robust and scalable manner.

Let’s explore how optimising media quality influences campaign effectiveness and cost.

Starcom sought to drive efficiency, review its current digital buying approaches, and gain greater transparency into its programmatic ad spend. They sought to develop a strategy to reduce wastage and increase spend on quality media by ensuring high quality across supply paths for a major finance vertical client.

Starcom looked to partner with IAS to expose the belief that low-quality media can cost more. Starcom and IAS worked to identify the highest quality media and the most efficient way to invest in those impressions.

Optimising their supply paths would enable more efficient use of media budgets to drive business outcomes.

IAS was able to “provide a unified mechanism to easily bring together and understand the complex cost structures in programmatic supply paths, saving traders time and putting more money towards working media.” -Jacques Edeling, Programmatic Lead, Starcom.

In partnership with IAS, Starcom could see exactly where their advertiser’s money was across a variety of programmatic partners and optimise immediately. This solution was then expanded across 18 markets for the finance advertiser.

One might assume that achieving high media quality comes at a higher cost. However, the Starcom example showcases that the benefits of investing in media quality far outweigh the perceived initial expenses. Effective digital advertising strategies rely on efficiently delivering the right message to the right audience. By utilising superior media assets, brands can optimise their campaigns for better targeting, relevance, and engagement. This, in turn, reduces wasted ad spend, maximizes ROI, and ensures that every advertising dollar is effectively utilised. Remember, media quality can be a game-changer for brands aiming to make a lasting impact and drive meaningful results in the competitive digital landscape.

As we’ve delved into the foundational principles of media quality and its impact on performance, we’re now witnessing its dynamic evolution. Media quality is transitioning from a simple measure of viewability to a nuanced understanding of attention, from a focus on brand safety to a consideration of brand suitability, and from a reliance on text-based analysis to the application of multimedia classification. Our media quality and optimisation approach is transforming, too – moving from a generalised “one size fits all” strategy to a custom-tailored approach. We’re shifting from using a narrow range of signals to embracing the power of machine learning and AI to interpret a broad array of cues encompassing audio and video, not just text.

As the media landscape continually metamorphoses, so does the demand for increasingly refined verification technology. Such sophisticated tools remain the crucial infrastructure of media success across evolving channels, from video and audio to gaming and beyond into the uncharted territory of future platforms.

Media quality can be a game-changer for brands aiming to make a lasting impact and drive meaningful results in the competitive digital landscape.