More impressions, more formats, more platforms, more optimisation signals, more dashboards…
Digital media has spent years getting better at delivering more, but more is not the same as better and we all really need to be sure we’re at the heart of this “more” and giving our clients “more” performance from their budgets.
If an impression isn’t seen, not safe, not transparent, poorly placed, over-frequency-heavy, or bought through an inefficient supply path, it isn’t “cheap”, it’s a wasted investment.
We all know better why media quality needs to stop being treated as a hygiene factor, but have we really considered it to be a performance strategy?
The False Economy of Cheap Reach
The UK digital advertising market reached £40.5bn in 2025, according to IAB UK. That’s a huge amount of money flowing through a very complex system. In that environment, it’s easy to chase efficiency in the narrowest sense.
Lower CPMs, cheaper reach, cheaper video views, lower cost-per-click are all metrics that matter, but they don’t tell the whole story.
A low-cost impression that doesn’t have a meaningful opportunity to influence someone isn’t efficient, and when you’re buying thousands, if not millions of those impressions, they become an expensive waste.
This is where the quality vs quantity debate needs to become more serious. A million impressions isn’t a million opportunities if too many are unseen, poorly targeted, or delivered in environments that don’t support the behaviour you need to influence.
More impressions don’t automatically mean more impact.
Quality is Not the Same as Premium
This isn’t an argument to amend every plan to only buy expensive media. The argument for quality doesn’t simply mean “premium”, it means fit for the job.
A quality media placement should have a real chance of doing what the plan needs it to do. That means being visible enough to be noticed, safe enough not to damage trust, transparent enough to understand, and relevant enough to the audience’s context or behaviour to make a difference.
Sometimes that will mean premium editorial environments, but sometimes it will mean carefully selected social, retail, video or open web environments.
The point isn’t the label, but whether the impression has a credible route to influence.
Media Quality is Now a Growth Issue
IAB Europe’s 2026 Attitudes to Digital Advertising report found that performance and efficiency remain major drivers of investment, while media quality issues such as fraud, brand safety, viewability and transparency remain major barriers to growth. So, the industry is already signalling this shift is happening.
Advertisers want performance, but performance depends on confidence that the media delivered is real, visible, and accountable.
We’ve also seen why supply-path quality matters. ISBA and PwC’s programmatic supply chain work showed how much effort is needed to improve match rates and reduce unattributable spend. If you don’t understand the route your media takes, you can’t properly judge the value it creates.
The Danger of Treating Quality as an Audit
Too often and too late, quality is checked after the strategy has been written and the budget has been allocated.
If viewability, suitability, transparency and supply-path control are only considered at the end, they become defensive measures, and don’t help design better performance.
To change the conversation during planning from a compliance box to tick to being a performance variable, the question to ask upfront is, “Is this media good enough to do the job?”
What This Means for Planning
This is where behavioural planning actually makes a difference and is the reason for being our focus.
If we know what behaviour we’re trying to influence, we can be much clearer about the kind of media quality we need.
Are we trying to create trust? Then environment, context and credibility matter.
Are we trying to build memory? Then visibility, attention and distinctiveness matter.
Are we trying to prompt action? Then relevance, timing and journey quality matter.
Are we trying to reduce wasted spend? Then transparency, frequency and supply path matter.
Once we’ve been able to define the behavioural job, “what needs to change in someone’s mind or behaviour, and what should happen next”. Then we can approach activation in a solutions-led way, choosing routes to execution, optimisation and measurement that fit the job, rather than defaulting to the cheapest or easiest channel option.
It’s not about adding complexity, but about making sure the media is good enough to perform in such a way that we are moving the client’s proverbial needle.
So What for Clients?
Media quality should be planned, not just audited. If the goal is performance, then quality can’t sit in a separate box marked “brand safety” or “verification”. It needs to be linked to the behavioural job of the campaign, the environments chosen, the supply routes used, and the way success is measured. The next performance advantage may not come from buying more impressions at a “cheap CPM”, but from being more disciplined about which impressions are worth buying.
