Maximizing Quality and Performance for Advertisers in EMEA

DV Global Insights Report Webinar – EMEA from DoubleVerify on Vimeo.

Last week, DV hosted a webinar for the EMEA region that focused on findings from our 2020 Global Insights Report (GIR). Our panel explored region-specific trends on brand suitability, fraud, viewability, contextual targeting, Connected TV (CTV) and more. This in-depth analysis aimed to provide attendees with insight and information to help optimize future campaign placements and improve existing campaign performance.

Speakers Included:

• Collette Spagnolo, Sr. Director, Marketing Analytics, DoubleVerify
• Tanzil Bukhari, Managing Director, EMEA, DoubleVerify
• Daniel Knapp, Chief Economist, IAB Europe

Some key takeaways from the webinar include:

Increased Brand Safety and Suitability Blocks and Incidents

While we’ve seen a slight decrease in brand suitability post-bid block rates on a global level, EMEA’s rates have increased slightly year-over-year. The same holds true with brand suitability incidents, as EMEA saw a 24% increase year-over-year.

Given the circumstances of this past year, the vast majority of our attendees (80%) have had to pivot their brand safety and suitability strategy, at least moderately. “Advertisers are having a more nuanced approach to better understand what they want to monitor and what they want to outright block,” noted DV’s Collette Spagnolo, during the fireside chat.

DV has proactively guided advertisers on best practices to ensure brand suitability, including ways to support news publishers during the COVID crisis. We also offer advertisers the option to exempt news sites or individual pages from our category classification to open up brand-safe scale.

Fraud Has Seen Some Interesting Movement

37% of attendees felt that fraud was a challenge on CTV. From a post-bid perspective, year-over-year, EMEA has stood out as the only region that has seen an increase in fraud rates. This is due in large part to the nascent environment of Connected TV (CTV), where we’ve seen a 161% increase year-over-year. “For EMEA, there isn’t that one CTV standard, which makes it challenging as it requires local partners and expertise,” said Daniel Knapp from IAB Europe.

DV has been at the forefront of the fight to combat CTV fraud, having developed a certification system to ensure that CTV fraud is being evaluated and avoided properly. When analyzing post-bid fraud rates across programmatic partners and DSPs, we see an 11x higher fraud rate on partners that do not have the certification versus those that do. This goes to show that the environment and the partner you’re buying with for CTV can strongly impact your end results.

Thanks to Mobile App, Viewability Has Increased

When it comes to viewability, EMEA has been a key driver of the increased performance that we’ve seen globally. In fact, there’s been double-digit growth in EMEA viewability across both display and video – 14% in display and 10% in video – compared to a 9% increase globally. As such, EMEA’s video performance is incredibly strong, even topping 80% in-app, as advertisers increasingly require strong viewable placements across their video buys.

Due to the open measurement initiative by the IAB, there’s also been an increase in the amount of impressions measured for viewability – especially in video and in-app, which had historically been more challenging environments. While the industry has not yet released a comprehensive solution to measure the IAB requirements for a viewable impression, our benchmark video completion rate in CTV is 90%.

A Post-Cookie Shift to Contextual Targeting

In light of stricter privacy regulations like GDPR and the decision by most browsers to sunset the use of third-party cookies, advertisers are looking for alternative ways to positively impact their performance, and this is especially in the EU.

As Collette puts it, “Moving into the final year of cookies, for all intents and purposes, we are seeing growth in the interest in using contextual growth. Not only in the usage, but also in kind of the definition of the tools that are available. We’re seeing advertisers really want precision targeting to get down to very specific topics and events that occur, and I think all of this ladders back to brand suitability and adjacency. We can see the initial results just from a successful brand safety strategy.”

We’ve recently launched custom contextual targeting, which aims to address marketers’ need for effective audience targeting based on interest or intent, as opposed to cookie-tracking. Download our snackable guide to find out more about our custom contextual targeting.