APAC media quality report finds global low 0.7% MFA rate

The record-low MFA rate suggests a cleaner supply chain, yet the high suitability fail rate indicates that streaming ads are frequently appearing alongside misaligned content. This discrepancy forces a shift away from aggregate regional benchmarks toward market-specific execution, particularly as video viewability fluctuates by 20 percentage points between major hubs like Australia and Japan. For the global streaming ecosystem, these findings highlight that low fraud metrics do not equate to brand safety, necessitating more granular pre-bid filtering tools. Watch for whether Japan’s 63.21% viewability rate triggers a shift in local programmatic buying standards to match higher-performing neighboring markets.

Integral Ad Science has built its Media Quality Report into a recurring industry benchmark over more than a decade of editions. The 20th edition, released in May 2025, analyzed more than 280 billion digital interactions daily across display, video, mobile, and CTV environments, establishing baseline metrics that the 21st edition now extends with deeper regional granularity. The 20th edition found that optimized campaign fraud rates globally held steady at 0.7%, the same figure APAC now reports for MFA specifically, while non-optimized campaigns saw fraud rates 15 times higher at 10.9%, a four-year high. That gap between protected and unprotected campaigns underscores why IAS positions its verification stack as essential infrastructure for programmatic advertising platforms operating in APAC's fragmented market.

The competitive and business context around media quality measurement has intensified as advertisers demand more granular data. Mediaweek reported that IAS's 20th edition highlighted Australia-specific findings, including desktop video viewability of 89.8% and video completion rates of 94.9%, figures that significantly outperform both global and APAC averages and reinforce Australia's video market as the region's strongest for ad effectiveness. The report also noted that APAC desktop video viewability surged from 69.2% in 2023 to 88.9% in 2024, well above the worldwide average of 83.9%, suggesting that the region's infrastructure improvements are outpacing other markets even as suitability risks persist. Brand risk composition is shifting as well, with violent content in APAC desktop display rising from 43.5% in the first half of 2024 to 54.3% in the second half.

On the technical side, the 21st edition's APAC data reveals that the region's overall video viewability of 80.2% sits close to the global average of 79.7%, but country-level dispersion remains extreme, with Australia at 83.83% and Japan at 63.21%. The 20th edition introduced vertical benchmarks and monthly performance trends for the first time, giving advertisers the ability to track seasonal patterns in fraud and viewability rather than relying solely on annual snapshots. IAS's methodology, drawing on impression-level analysis across more than 300 billion daily interactions in the latest edition, positions the company to detect emerging MFA clusters before they reach the thresholds seen in North America (1.5%) and EMEA (0.9%), providing an early-warning function for APAC buyers who have historically relied on regional averages that mask significant local variation.