India, New Zealand and Vietnam are top brand-safe APAC markets for desktop displays

India reported a decline in desktop display brand risk at 0.8% – a reduction of 1.4%, New Zealand reported 1.3% brand risk, and Singapore reported 1.4% brand risk. Indonesia brand risk, though on the higher side, showed improved brand safety levels at 4.7%.

“Indonesia’s programmatic buys have seen higher media quality performance than publisher direct inventory, generating far lower risk and fraud rates for advertisers through optimization strategies such as pre-bid targeting. Therefore, spending on programmatic will become even more essential,” said Laura Quigley, the senior vice-president for APAC at IAS.

“As the 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. To reduce brand risk from their inventory, Singapore and regional advertisers are strongly encouraged to closely monitor and optimize against fraud by utilizing pre-bid tools to target away from unsuitable environments that don’t meet their brand values.”

What did the report find?

• For mobile web display, publisher direct inventory showed a brand risk level of 5.6% compared to 3.9% observed via programmatic inventory. Indonesia is a mobile-first market, with 96.4% of the country’s 202.6 million internet population using the device to access the web, and mobile ads are deeply embedded in most marketing strategies.

• Mobile web display inventory in Indonesia registered the highest brand risk globally at 4.5% in the HL of 2021, while the worldwide average stood at 2.6%. Meanwhile, for mobile web display, Indonesia also saw one of the biggest reductions in brand risk in H1 2021 compared to H1 2020.

• Mobile campaigns in India had more viewable impressions in H1 2021. Viewability on mobile web display increased by 1% annually to 58.9% in H1 2021, while viewability on mobile in-app display increased from 51.3% to 54.1%. Global display viewability was down 2.4% on desktop and 3.3% on mobile web year-on-year, reaching 69.5% and 64.3% respectively.

• The worldwide reductions were driven by drops across APAC, with India registering a 7.2% drop to post 54.9% viewability in desktop environments. In India, desktop and mobile display environments showed significantly higher viewability rates in programmatically traded inventory than publisher direct inventory.

• On average, 91.4% of viewable desktop video ads worldwide were watched through the first quartile (the first 25% of the video ad) in H1 2021, with 78.3% of these impressions remaining viewable through completion. Australia registered the highest desktop video ad completion rates, as well as the lowest drop-off (-10%) of any market worldwide.

• By contrast, the US registered the lowest video ad completion rate of 90.1% for the first quartile, with a 13.6% drop-off to average 76.5% full ad completions during the same period.

• Optimized-against-ad-fraud levels in Japan decreased by 0.2% for a desktop display to report 2.6% in H1 2021, which was the second-highest ad fraud rate globally. The worldwide fraud rates on desktop display were 1%.

• Global ad fraud on mobile web display dropped from 0.5% to 0.4% between H1 2020 and H1 2021. Japan remained the market with the highest ad fraud rates in mobile web environments, with display reaching 2.3% and video reaching 2.9%.