Proactive Optimisation Turns Media Quality into a Performance Engine
The new global benchmarks show that premium video, mobile media efficiency, and sustainable supply chains directly drive measurable business growth.
As digital advertising becomes increasingly fragmented and AI-generated content reshapes the media landscape, advertisers are placing greater emphasis on media quality alongside scale.
While marketers continue investing heavily in video, CTV, and social media, ensuring that campaigns appear in trusted, high-attention environments has become equally critical for driving measurable business outcomes.
Reflecting these shifts, Integral Ad Science (IAS), a global platform connecting AI-powered media quality to real business outcomes, has released the 21st edition of its Media Quality Report (MQR).
The report analyses over 300 billion daily digital interactions, providing the industry’s most definitive view of open internet benchmarks, alongside actionable, channel-specific insights across Connected TV and social, empowering marketers to maximise ROI across the entire media mix.
Media Quality Enters a New Era
The report identifies a significant turning point in digital advertising.
While the open internet remains essential for reaching audiences at scale, unmanaged display environments—particularly on mobile web—have become concentrated sources of ad clutter and Made-for-Advertising (MFA) inventory.
By contrast, premium video environments continue to outperform display in both viewability and attention, reinforcing their growing role in delivering stronger business outcomes.
These findings build upon broader market shifts identified in IAS’s 2026 Industry Pulse Report, which revealed that 88% of experts rank digital video as a top investment priority, and 84% say the same for social media.
However, rising concerns around AI-generated content, creator environments, and transparency are reshaping how marketers approach media quality and performance. As investment accelerates in these formats, the data shows that success will depend on balancing scale with control, while facilitating media quality and performance across campaigns to drive measurable outcomes.
“In an era of AI-accelerated content, buying massive scale is no longer enough; winning brands are optimising for verified attention that drives business outcomes,” said Lidiane Jones, CEO of Integral Ad Science.
“Our latest Media Quality Report shows that navigating this new landscape requires more than just defensive guardrails. Marketers need proactive, AI-driven intelligence to cut through the synthetic noise, eliminate invisible waste, and transform media quality into a true performance engine.”
Key Global Findings
The report highlights three trends that are reshaping how marketers evaluate campaign quality, optimise media investments, and drive business outcomes.
1. Video viewability outperforms display by 11.8 percentage points
The performance gap between video and display continues to widen into a structural reality. Global video viewability reached 79.7%, outperforming display viewability (67.9%) by 11.8 percentage points. The data reflects sustained consumer demand for immersive, video-first environments across CTV and social platforms.
Marketers who activated attention-based strategies in these environments saw strong results: controlled campaign studies reported a 56% increase in attention scores and a 76% decline in cost-per-click, while household-level sales lift was up to 313% higher for high-attention video ads.
2. Risk and media waste concentrate in mobile web display
While media quality improved broadly across many formats, risk and inefficiency have become highly concentrated in mobile web display.
This environment accounted for 45.1% of all impressions but drove an outsized share of media waste, harboring 54.9% of brand suitability violations, 71.5% of global ad clutter, and 71.9% of all MFA impressions.
The MFA rate on mobile web display is now four times higher than on desktop.
This clear disparity highlights a powerful opportunity for marketers: by pairing open web scale with proactive, page-level optimisation, they can easily filter out cluttered inventory and ensure their mobile investments are focused entirely on high-performing, high-value placements.
3. Sustainability and media quality show a positive correlation
MQR highlights a measurable connection between climate-conscious media buying and overall media quality, proving that a cleaner, green-certified media supply chain is inherently a higher-performing one.
The data shows that advertisers who actively measured and reduced carbon emissions in their digital campaigns using IAS and Good-Loop achieved consistently stronger quality performance.
For example, green-certified campaigns in EMEA saw a 3.9 percentage point lift in quality impression rates overall, and campaigns in the Travel & Entertainment vertical experienced an 8.7 percentage point lift.
The Next Chapter of Media Quality
The report indicates that digital advertising is shifting beyond simple reach and impressions towards verified attention, transparency, and measurable outcomes.
As AI-generated content, fragmented media environments, and premium video continue to reshape the advertising ecosystem, marketers will need to balance scale with media quality to maximise campaign effectiveness.
The findings suggest that AI-driven optimisation, greater transparency, and investment in trusted advertising environments will increasingly determine campaign performance across the evolving digital landscape.
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