Australia had the highest ad fraud rate on desktop video globally, more than tripling to 2.4% from from 0.7% in the six months to June, according to Integral Ad Science's Media Quality Report.
The rise was driven by a spike in fraud activity targeting publisher direct video inventory that pushed ad fraud rates to 4.4%, up from 0.7% a year earlier.
The worldwide average was 1%. In comparison, programmatic drove greater efficiency generating a fraud rate of 1.6%. The average non-optmised ad fraud rate worldwide on desktop video was 7.2%.
Jessica Miles, Country Manager ANZ at IAS: “Video advertising has gained strong traction among Australian advertisers as consumers continue to spend more time engaging with video content."
According to the IAB Australia Online Advertising Expenditure Report for June 2021, video grew 73% compared to the same quarter last year and now dominates the market with a 55% market share.
"Traders of programmatic video are reaping the benefits of increased control, generating far lower risk and fraud rates across their investments through optimisation strategies such as pre-bid targeting," says Miles.
"As video consumption increases underpinned by the rapid growth of connected TV (CTV), the control and scale provided by programmatic will become even more essential.
"As technology evolves, programmatic will not only facilitate investment into quality impressions but also drive value beyond verification with privacy-compliant, contextual avoidance, and targeting combined with enriched channel-level insights.”
Video viewability levels were up. Connected TV (CTV) remained the most viewable format overall, reaching 93.2% in teh first half of 2021.
Desktop video viewability rose 1.8 percentage points (pp) to reach 77% worldwide, with Australia showing a 2.2 pp annual improvement to register at 79.1%, the second-highest globally after Italy (85.1%).
Australia reported an increase of 3.8 percentage points annual improvement for mobile web video at 74.1%, while the worldwide average stood at 79%.
On average, 91.4% of viewable desktop video ads worldwide were watched through the first quartile (the first 25% of the video ad) in six months to June, with 78.3% of these impressions remaining viewable through completion.
Australia registered the highest desktop video ad completion rates, as well as the largest drop-off (-10pp) of any market worldwide. By contrast, the US registered the lowest video ad completion rate of 90.1% for the first quartile, with a 13.6pp drop-off to average 76.5% full ad completions during the same period.
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