By Joe Wilson, Strategic Partnerships Director, ANZ – DoubleVerify
Social media is powerful and immediate – a source of information, entertainment and discovery. But one ad next to unsuitable content can erode trust and damage your brand.
DV’s Walled Gardens report found that 53% of Australians have seen AI-generated content on social media. Furthermore, DV’s latest Media Quality in the Age of AI report found that 52% of Australians reacted negatively to brands appearing alongside low-quality, spam-like AI-generated content – the highest result in APAC, compared with an APAC average of 42%.
For marketers, the challenge is no longer simply competing with other brands. It is competing for attention, relevance and context in an environment where content is being created faster, cheaper and at a greater scale, while algorithms increasingly determine what people see.
Aussie marketers face no shortage of commercial pressure, from demonstrating ROI to navigating an increasingly fragmented media landscape. Platforms can process vast amounts of data and optimise media at speed, but marketers cannot rely solely on platform metrics to determine what success looks like.
Independent signals, such as attention, add a layer of intelligence beyond platform metrics, helping marketers understand how creative, audience and media work together. This provides a clearer view of what is driving value and where opportunities exist.
Creative remains one of the biggest drivers of advertising performance. Mutinex research shows that creative accounts for 54% of ROAS variation, more than publisher, format or channel. Yet creative and media are still managed in silos, limiting marketers’ ability to understand how they influence one another.
Members at the RESET 2026 luncheon, where DoubleVerify set out the case for independent measurement signals.
The opportunity starts with asking better questions:
- Which creative is driving value?
- Who is driving the strongest results, and where is performance highest?
- How quickly is creative fatiguing? And where should investment increase, decrease or stop? For influencer campaigns, these insights can also help determine which creators to use and when to deploy brand versus influencer assets to maximise ROAS.
Such intelligence can shift marketers from reactive to proactive, helping them anticipate creative fatigue, informing media allocation and optimising creative before performance begins to decline. It is about leveraging platforms for scale while retaining the human craft, creativity and judgement that drive effective marketing.
The future is not about chasing attention for attention’s sake. It is about identifying the signals that matter most and turning them into actionable intelligence.
Download DV’s Global Insights: Media Quality in the Age of AI report for region-specific media quality benchmarks and the latest marketer and consumer sentiment around AI. Or, contact us to learn how we can help power your media performance.