IAB Singapore working on regional standard to combat ad fraud

• Highest rate of click fraud is in South-East Asia, India and the Middle East
• IAB and major players to draft white paper to establish measurement standard

 
THE International Advertising Bureau (IAB) Singapore has created a Viewability Roundtable and Committee to create and establish a standard and guideline for South-East Asia to define exactly what viewability means and how this is defined in the region.
 
In a statement, it said that there has been a lot of talk recently around ad fraud and ad blocking, but what has not been established is defining and standardising ‘viewability’ to combat this.
 
“By viewability, we mean the metric that tracks exactly what counts as a view on an ad,” it said in a statement, adding that more mature markets such as the United Kingdom and United States already have a standard established for this.
 
Currently, US$7.5 billion is being lost per year globally on ad fraud, IAB Singapore said.
 
Besides bots, there are even ‘click farms’ where people are just clicking and clicking for even a millisecond on ads. The highest rate of click fraud is in South-East Asia, India and the Middle East.
 
The IAB Viewability Roundtable is an initiative to establish a viewability benchmark for ad performance in South-East Asia, IAB Singapore said.
 
Over the course of the next four months, it will bring together major players from across the entire marketplace of platforms, publishers, agencies and brands to piece together a white paper to establish a measurement standard, and have it third-party verified.
 
These major players include senior digital leaders from publishing platforms such as Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, MediaCorp and global brand agencies including MEC, SPH, PubMatic, Xaxis and Starcom.
 
After an initial discussion, the majority of participants agreed that the metric that will be put forward to be tested by a third party such as Moat and/ or comScore for viewability in South-East Asia will be the MRC (Media Rating Council) standard of 50% pixels and view at one second.
 
The test will be for both video and display inventory using the same standard and is essentially counting Ad Slot viewability rather than the actual ad itself.
 
The next phase of research will be a deep dive into the effectiveness of the time individuals spent on the display advertisement.
 
The IAB Viewability white paper will be completed within four months from the start of the test and will require the active participation of all members present at the first meeting, IAB Singapore said.
 
The Roundtable will meet once a month for the next four months to develop the next stages of the report. All members are required to attend in order to achieve a united voice within the industry, it added.
 
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