Articles and Research

Comcast Technology Solutions and FreeWheel Partner to Bring Programmatic Advertising

From GDPR to ad fraud arrests, 2018 has been an interesting year of ups and downs for the ad tech industry. Here's some of the biggest ad fraud schemes and ad tech stories - along with a collection of company exits and acquisitions from the past year: 

Fraudlogix is launching two new data feeds: Domain Reputation Check and Ad Blocker Intelligence. Users of the Domain Reputation Check can pre-check domains, and the Ad Blocker Intelligence will help users block the ad blockers pre-bid. Our IP Block List has been consistently effective for immediately improving the quality of inventory and campaigns. So we've decided to take this approach to quality a few steps forward by offering the two additional data-based feeds.

Calls to secure the digital advertising supply chain have contributed in part to a growing trend of advertising technology companies making big moves to fight ad fraud and provide more transparency. The trend will continue in 2019, further shifting the onus of catching ad fraud and securing campaigns away from advertisers. From the supply- to the demand-side of the chain, here’s a full-stack look at how the industry is fighting ad fraud and working to provide advertisers with a better programmatic experience.

Every corner of the programmatic ecosystem can be affected by ad fraud – even premium publishers and quality ad tech vendors can get inadvertently pulled into programmatic’s fraudulent underbelly. Some publishers are unaware of a problem until they’re blocked from a platform. On the flip side, an ad tech platform on the supply side might approach a normally quality publisher with evidence of ad fraud and the publisher legitimately doesn’t know where the problem is originating or how to fix it. So how does this happen, and what can publishers do to prevent ending up on someone’s blacklist?

With 2018 on the horizon, we thought we would  look at what the new year might bring in terms of inventory quality within the programmatic industry. Here are some items we think will help shape the industry in 2018:

IAB's ads.txt initiative is designed to thwart the unauthorized selling of ad inventory and full-on domain spoofing within the RTB programmatic markets. Adoption by publishers and ad tech has rapidly grown recently and the subject has received plenty of industry attention. Major DSPs, including Google’s Double Click Bid Manager, AppNexus, The Trade Desk, MediaMath, Adobe Advertising Cloud, and DataXu are reportedly already filtering for ads.txt or will in the near future.

The supply side of the RTB Programmatic industry walks a precarious line between maintaining important publisher partnerships and ensuring those same partners are sending quality traffic. Inevitably, a time will come when a publisher’s traffic sends quality flags flying. So now what?  You want to maintain the partnership but at the same time issues with invalid impressions, brand safety, and viewability need to be addressed. It’s time to be candid with your supply partners.

With millions of websites sending ad inventory into the programmatic marketplaces, it's difficult to quickly determine the quality of traffic from any domain without closely monitoring the impressions. However, there are some tell-tale signs that should act as a warning that a domain's traffic will be less than premium.