As we approach the festive season, there is no escaping the shopping frenzy as well as the deals, discounts, and offers numerous brands offer to attract customers. With the arrival of the famous double-day sales such as 11/11 and 12/12 as well as Harbonas, the holiday season in south-east Asian countries presents an unparalleled opportunity for marketers to strengthen their brand with existing customers and attract new customers when it comes to digital advertising. One can witness the entire spectrum of digital advertising at work, with brands adopting different strategies to attract buyers. These shopping events act like ladders of opportunities for brands of all sizes to increase revenue. Big savings by offering lower prices, free delivery, and shopping rewards help eCommerce marketplaces yield more profit from existing customers and attract new customers simultaneously. The majority of consumers in Southeast Asia say they’ve purchased products online during the Mega Sale period. Particularly in Thailand and Vietnam, the number of first-time online buyers is high with 64% and 53% respectively.
While marketers see their campaigns play out, they must also stay alert and watch out for specific pitfalls, such as ad fraud, brand risk, brand safety, and false viewability metrics. To help protect these campaigns from such threats, IAS has developed cutting-edge solutions to make the internet a safe place for advertisers. Let’s look at a few advertising pitfalls marketers can avoid during the festive season to protect their digital ads, campaigns, and brands:
- Ad fraud is on the Rise Globally
A new Juniper Research study has found that the value of digital advertising spend lost to fraud will reach $68 billion globally in 2022, rising from $59 billion in 2021. Ad fraud can exist in various forms, such as domain spoofing, cookie stuffing, pixel stuffing, ad stacking, ad injection, geo masking, and bots/ non-human traffic. Fraud fluctuates depending on the country and the device. IAS sees from its H1 2022 Media Quality Report (MQR) that, globally, ad fraud rates rose 10 times faster for campaigns that ran without anti-fraud protection (i.e. non-optimised). Unsurprisingly, campaigns not utilising any ad fraud mitigation strategy attract the most fraud globally.
Marketers can no longer solely rely on monitoring technologies to effectively mitigate ad fraud and using blocking technologies is the need of the hour. Working with a verification partner such as IAS becomes essential to help marketers maximise impact and create outcomes without worrying about ad spending going to ad fraudsters. For example, IAS’ industry-first solution, Total Visibility, delivers radical transparency into your programmatic media buys, while reducing media waste, providing financial transparency, and optimising programmatic buying.
- Adoption of Context-Based Strategies Help Prevent Brand Risk in Southeast Asia
Google’s decision to postpone phasing out third-party cookies has provided marketers with a golden opportunity to build a solid foundation for the following age of digital advertising. Focused on first-party data targeting, context-based strategies continue to evolve, thus helping to counteract brand risk. Context-based strategies allow ad buyers and sellers to avoid misinformation with minimal impact on reach.
It is important to note that in countries like India, Indonesia, Singapore, and Vietnam, advertising alongside irrelevant/harmful content such as illegal downloads, offensive language and controversial content, violence, and hate speech was noticeably higher according to IAS’ MQR report. These threats were identified for advertising campaigns across desktop displays, desktop videos, and mobile web displays.
Adopting context-based strategies will help marketers to protect their brands and campaigns from being advertised next to unsuitable content. In addition, contextual targeting strategies yield more substantial consumer attention, significantly boosting brand favorability and consumer purchase intent.
IAS’ Context Control Targeting reads the entire page, leveraging sentiment and emotion to classify content more granularly at scale. This allows marketers and advertisers to reach their target audience without using cookies.
- Tapping into Quality Inventory
Video inventory is in high demand because of the trend above and the prominence of advertising on Connected TV (CTV). As OTT platforms continue to dominate viewership across south-east Asian countries, we are witnessing a rise in the number of cord-cutters. Recently, IAS ran an online survey in Indonesia to determine consumer perceptions of CTV and streaming video content consumption. The survey found that CTV has become almost universally adopted — 7 in 10 consumers confirmed they have access to a CTV device.
With the upcoming world cup soccer competition followed by a festive buying season, marketers must optimise towards quality inventory. Working with trusted partners and marketplaces that provide quality will help marketers make the most of their campaigns. Focusing on video to drive effective, meaningful interactions and increase engagement through mobile devices will be key. Adopting effective solutions to mitigate these challenges becomes the next step to ensure you get the most value for your ad spends. The first step is checking whether your ads are seen in fraud-free, brand-safe, and suitable environments.
Views expressed are personal.
