Sophia Warren.
The AdNews end of year Perspectives, looking back at 2025 and forward to next year.
Sophia Warren, Head of Key Accounts and Growth, Director ANZ, DoubleVerify
In 2026, media complexity is the norm, not the exception.
From retail media networks to CTV and major social platforms, walled gardens have taken over advertising. These channels offer high potential rewards to marketers who can harness them successfully. In Australia, for example, social media influencers impact 41% of purchase decisions.
But how do you uphold brand governance when every advertising platform is its own separate world? Every walled garden has its own data, formats and rules. There’s limited visibility and siloed measurement. Add in constantly changing user-generated and AI content and a high bar for effective media management, and it’s easy to see why marketers can have a tough time navigating it all.
To compete (and win!) advertisers must adopt AI tools to help them operate quickly at scale, maintain consistent quality control across all walled gardens, and define campaign success in a new way.
- AI Is No Longer Optional
In 2026, AI will be essential to ensure content quality and campaign performance in fast-paced walled garden environments. Without automated workflows, content approval and brand-suitability checks, advertisers simply won’t be able to keep pace with consumer behaviour. When marketers must respond to trends within hours, not days, manual optimisations aren’t sustainable.
This is especially true for influencer and social campaigns, which are critical to marketers. Already, 68% of ANZ marketers invest in social, and the majority plans to increase spend, according to 2025 DV Global Insights: APAC.
But a social-first strategy requires an AI-powered agility most Australian marketers lack. Only 46% use AI and automation in any advertising capacity, according to 2025 DV Global Insights: AI, Automation and the Future of Digital Advertising.
Advertisers need intelligent automation that can make immediate optimisations, scale creative, uphold brand integrity and deliver measurable outcomes across every channel, all in real time.
- Consistent Content Quality Is a Must
Walled garden formats and strategies vary. Your brand standards can’t.
The good news: brand suitability violations in ANZ dropped 10% year-on-year to the lowest rate in the region, according to 2025 DV Global Insights: APAC. But as their social, CTV and retail media investments increase, marketers shouldn’t get too comfortable. Granular pre-bid suitability controls are essential and must be tailored to the brand’s specific values and campaign goals, not simply to industry norms.
This is especially important on social platforms dominated by UGC, where AI slop and deepfakes can proliferate. The sheer volume of media produced requires new verification capabilities. Advertisers must implement cross-channel quality governance to ensure that their standards for suitability and driving better performance are consistently met.
- Attention Is the Ultimate Performance Metric
While viewability remains a critical metric, attention-based optimisation can deliver 50% greater lift in brand KPIs than can viewability alone, according to 2024 DV Global Insights. Unfortunately, in ANZ, attention scores are among the lowest in the APAC region.
In CTV and retail media campaigns, CPMs are higher and the pressure to prove ROI has never been more intense. Marketers need to know not just whether an ad was seen, but whether it was noticed, engaged with and acted-on.
And it’s not enough to wait to find out in post-campaign reports. Metrics such as time-in-view, audibility, interaction and screen share should be included in campaign-planning and optimisation frameworks to influence real-time campaign decisions.
Attention is a privacy-friendly, platform-agnostic metric that can anchor media decisions across all environments. For ANZ brands striving for efficiency and impact, prioritising attention is the most actionable way to understand and improve walled garden campaign performance.
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