How media quality can help drive performance in digital advertising

With the growth in mobile users and digital media consumption in India, consumers are now accessing news sites and social media more often than ever. As a result, digital advertising is now at the crux of revenue generation for both brands and publishers, especially with its ability to target audiences precisely through multiple channels.

“Digital news and social media platforms have become treadmills that pull us into a relentless news cycle,” says Oppo’s CMO, Damyant Singh Khanoria. “All of these factors increase the need for agility in digital advertising strategies, and we expect the digital-first communication approach to grow even faster this year.”

How Does Media Quality Affect Advertisers?

Research from Harris Poll and DoubleVerify (DV) found that consumers feel it is critically important that a brand advertises on content that is safe, accurate and trustworthy. In fact, nearly 90% of consumers feel that brands bear responsibility for ensuring their ads run beside content that is safe. Nearly two-thirds (65%) of consumers would also be likely to stop using the brand or product if they viewed the brand’s digital advertising beside false, objectionable or inflammatory content.

Media quality is defined by four key components — brand safety, fraud, viewability and in-geo. At DV, the DV Authentic Ad™ is a proprietary, MRC-accredited metric that verifies ads are fully viewed, by a real person, in a brand-safe environment, within the intended geography. It represents the impression the brand intended to buy, and global brands use the DV Authentic Ad™ as the single source of truth for media quality.

When asked about how advertisers in India are measuring media quality, Arvind RP, Director - Marketing and Communications, McDonald’s India (West and South) responded, “We derive media quality from 4 large buckets – viewability, OTR (on-target reach), brand safety and ad fraud (invalid traffic). Viewability and OTR ensure that our ad impression is served to the right audience and in the right attention frame. Whereas, ad fraud measurement makes sure that the rightful click/install is attributed to the business KPI and is served in the right environment.”

Brands and agencies are calling for tighter controls, greater visibility and a renewed commitment to brand safety and reputation management. As digital has democratized content creation and distribution, it comes as no surprise that brands and advertisers in India are acutely aware of the situation and engaging in all endeavors to improve the quality of digital advertising.

Performance-Driven Insights to Bolster Media Efficiency

Consequently, with the recent news of Google’s decision to deprecate cookies within the next few years, there is a growing importance and demand for privacy-friendly metrics and data-driven insights to help improve the performance of digital advertising. Apart from traditional KPIs such as viewability and clicks, advertisers are also looking for granular insights to judge the effectiveness of their media buys. In fact, research from eMarketer found that 98% of marketers believe that by looking at deeper attention metrics, they could improve campaign performance and advertising outcomes.

Building on the DV Authentic Ad™, DV developed an advanced performance-based solution called DV Authentic Attention™, which provides actionable insights into what truly drives campaign effectiveness for global brands. By measuring exposure and engagement metrics, advertisers are now able to leverage privacy-friendly data that can directly impact the performance of a campaign. 

This is a paradigm shift for verification — moving from quality measurement to performance intelligence — and a monumental opportunity for advertisers.

Critical Importance of Third-Party Measurement Tools

As brands in India continue to increase their spending in digital advertising, building trust and transparency in the digital media ecosystem is imperative. It offers advertisers more measurement parity among different ad buys and a better view of the media supply chain across campaigns and platforms.

This also means that more brands have begun to accept independent, third-party verification tools to authenticate the quality of their digital inventory. “For us at McDonald’s India, the first step was to identify the right partners to work with, as well as tech to support and qualify every impression,”added Arvind of McDonald’s. With third party measurement and investment in the right tools, we now know our metrics well. We have learned to pay for performance and not clicks.”

This is a partner content article in association with exchange4media