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 a view of open internet benchmarks alongside actionable, channel-specific insights across Connected TV and social.

This year’s report highlights a defining inflection point in the digital advertising landscape. Key findings reveal a stark division in media quality: while the open internet remains crucial for achieving scale, unmanaged open internet display environments, particularly on mobile, have become highly concentrated sources of ad clutter and Made-for-Advertising (MFA) site impressions. Conversely, quality video environments continue to deliver higher viewability and attention, driving measurable business growth.

These findings build upon broader market shifts identified in IAS’s 2026 Industry Pulse Report, which revealed that 88 per cent of experts rank digital video as a top investment priority, and 84 per cent 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,” commented 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 findings from the 21st edition of MQR:

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 per cent, outperforming display viewability (67.9 per cent) 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 per cent increase in attention scores and a 76 per cent decline in cost-per-click, while household-level sales lift was up to 313 per cent 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 per cent of all impressions but drove an outsized share of media waste, harboring 54.9 per cent of brand suitability violations, 71.5 per cent of global ad clutter, and 71.9 per cent 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 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.

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Categories: Advertising, AI, Articles, Research

Tags: advertising, AI, CTV, emea, IAS