IPG Mediabrands Australia has launched a media industry initiative that focuses on 100% viewable and fraud-free delivery of digital media bookings.
Its investment and intelligence division, Magna Global, is spearheading the initiative called 'Project Quality'. The project has been 18 months in development and is designed to instigate action in all sectors of digital media placement, including exchanges and publishers.
Maria Grivas, head of digital for Magna Global, said while 100% may be an ambitious goal today, it should not limit the ultimate goal and the company is launching Project Quality to prompt more action across the industry. She said the launch is aimed at prompting more action across the industry.
“We believe that the broader industry – agencies, exchanges, advertisers and publishers – need to actively strive towards 100% viewable and fraud-free digital delivery,” she said.
“By collaborating with publishers and exchanges, we are aiming to maximise adoption and, therefore, campaign effectiveness. To that end, we have agreed to accept a publisher’s viewability measure provided it’s from an industry accredited third party and an IPG Mediabrands approved vendor.”
The business says by the end of November, all Mediabrands' clients will have their own access to “bespoke real-time reports” that will identify their digital media placements.
It will be available across all divisions and clients of the group, including major media agencies UM and Initiative. Every IPG Mediabrands' client will have access to a quality assurance report that details current levels of viewability, site quality and on-target delivery of every measurable impression. Clients and Mediabrands executives will view the data on individual dashboards that have been developed within the media group.
In an opinion piece today on AdNews, CEO of the IAB, Alice Manners, said viewability is still very much a work in progress in the Australian marketplace.
“The reality is that there is still work to be done before we will be in a comfortable position to trade on viewable impressions in the Australian marketplace. And to get to that point it will need all of us to roll up our sleeves and get involved,” Manners said.
Initiatives such as Project Quality from IPG, she said, make a lot of sense.
“They acknowledge that trading is not yet viable so they aren’t placing unreasonable demands on publishers to trade on 100% viewability. Instead, they are exploring other options such as working with publishers to optimise during campaign flight to demonstrate improved viewability. It’s a collaborative approach that involves us all rolling up our sleeves – and it’s what we’d like to see others in the industry do.”
Jess White, managing director of Mediabrands’ independent programmatic agency, Cadreon, also sees this as a positive step forward for programmatic.
“Traditional metrics are somewhat limiting as they ignore the ‘quality’ variable which has a significant impact on clients’ brands and performance,” White said.
“Cadreon has been optimising towards quality metrics for more than 12 months and we have seen CPAs almost halve in instances where we have shifted the in-view percentage by 30% or more. In video, where we are verifying the in-target accuracy of audience recall, scores have improved by 11%-23%. Scale versus 100% ‘quality’ remains a persistent challenge but Project Quality is a strong leap in the right direction.”
Grivas added that Project Quality would continue to evolve from its launch phase.
“New technologies, opportunities and challenges are constantly developing in the digital ad space and we will continue to advance Project Quality to keep pace with the market. Using our internal technology experts, we will develop new specialisations in areas that deepen our knowledge of accuracies and efficiencies in digital delivery,” she said.
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