The New Super-Signal: Data Integrity Is the Critical Growth Driver in the AI Era
The New Super-Signal: Data Integrity Is the Critical Growth Driver in the AI Era
For years, digital advertising has chased volume, often sacrificing quality and transparency in the process. Compliant's new "Data Integrity Impact Study" is here to change that. This comprehensive global research, independently validated by mediasense, challenges the fundamental assumptions of programmatic buying and proves that by curating inventory upstream based on data integrity, brands can unlock compounding value in terms of efficiency, performance, and cost savings.
The Findings: Quality Over Volume, Performance Over Waste
As reported in AdExchanger, our study confirms what many industry leaders suspected: the long tail of programmatic inventory is an unnecessary cost and risk. By focusing on quality, not volume, multinational brands in our controlled A/B tests achieved remarkable results:
- 33% lower Cost Per Action (CPA): Proof that targeting integrity delivers immediate, bottom-line efficiency.
- 5% higher Return On Ad Spend (ROAS).
- Brands reduced the number of publishers in campaigns by as much as 21% (removing ~7,000 domains) with absolutely no impact on media reach or performance KPIs.
- The top 1,000 high-performing publishers deliver 90% of campaign impressions, making the rest of the ecosystem a significant source of waste.
- One major CPG company identified a 32% lower TrueCPM efficiency and a $128K / £98K cost saving simply by redistributing 8% of spend to high-integrity inventory.
CEO's Take: The Shift from Programmatic to Agentic
As Compliant CEO and co-founder Jamie Barnard stated, "Data and input quality become exponentially more important as media buying shifts from volume to value, and from programmatic to agentic. This study proves that curating high-integrity inventory upstream creates compounding value downstream in terms of transparency, efficiency and performance."
Post-Cookie Infrastructure Built on Quicksand
The study also revealed a critical weakness in the current identity landscape: Independent analysis of nine major Universal ID (UID) providers found that nearly all concentrate overwhelmingly on publisher inventory with low data integrity standards. This suggests that if user data is collected from domains with bad data practices, it undermines the integrity of the entire identity graph, a major concern for a post-cookie future.
AI Demands Better Data: The Role of the DII
The shift to AI-driven media buying makes data quality non-negotiable. With 85% of media leaders expressing high or extreme concern about data protection when using AI, the industry needs a governance layer. The Data Integrity Index (DII) provides this, enabling autonomous AI agents to make responsible and effective investment decisions, ensuring AI scales efficiency instead of amplifying waste.
Read the Full Report:
The research report, “Data Integrity: A Super-Signal for the AI Era,” is available here. Contact us today to conduct your own "Proof of Impact" assessment.