Interactive Advertising Bureau
24 July 2016

Member blog - Adform - Adform Helping IAB and the EU Drive Industry-Wide Brand Safety Initiatives

Programmatic advertising has become an essential component of modern marketers’ digital strategies. With its real time insights, granular targeting, effective tracking, and precise cross-device capabilities, programmatic advertising has gone mainstream, with most publishers now offering premium inventory for Real-Time Bidding (RTB) buying.

However, nothing comes without challenges.

A major concern for marketers in regards to RTB has always been brand safety. Marketers naturally need their ads to appear on sites that align with their brand’s DNA. Unfortunately, when inventory is purchased via an open ad exchange, brands do run the risk that their ads could appear on undesirable sites due to nefarious activity.

However, since the dawn of programmatic, Adform has invested considerable resources into creating a wide range of market leading data science solutions based on complex algorithms to effectively combat fraudulent activity.

As experts within the field, we are fully dedicated to providing our clients with a brand safe programmatic environment, and actively support initiatives that help us ensure that we remain at the very forefront of brand safety. We have therefore been assisting the European Commission and IAB Europe at the Intellectual Property Right (IPR) Enforcement Conference in a project which aims to eliminate commercial scale online IPR infringements by preventing money from online advertising budgets flowing to websites based on such activities.

At the conference, a wide range of key European and international decision makers, public representatives, enforcement agencies, multinational companies and other stakeholders reviewed the progress made and planned the next steps in arranging  and applying new measures to further disrupt and suppress all IP infringing activities at their source, with the goal of ensuring full supply chain integrity.

Being part of the IAB Europe Policy Committee and the Digital Single Market Task Force, our CTO Jakob Bak said of the project:

“This initiative is a very welcome collaboration between government bodies and the industry towards ensuring brand safe advertising placements. On a more practical level, I initially expect the initiative will help ensure that the process of sharing black lists (of IPR infringing sites) with local police, enforcement agencies and other industry partners becomes a much more streamlined and common practice. Further down the road, I expect that increased industry participation (based on a self-regulatory approach) will result in higher commitment by advertisers, intermediaries, sell-side networks and exchanges. This is key in order to effectively eliminate advertising revenue flowing to these illegal websites, and will thereby disrupt IP infringing activities. This initiative is a positive development towards increased industry collaboration and commitment in regards to tackling the larger issues I see in terms of combatting programmatic fraud.”

The initiatives regarding online advertising are only a part of the Commission’s focus, which also deals with the illegal counterfeiting of physical goods. However, Jakob Bak sees similarities between counterfeiting physical goods and ad fraud:

“In my view, online advertising fraud is simply digital counterfeiting, as fake inventory is often sold while labelled as a premium brand. Although Adform has our own powerful fraud prevention technology (called Bearskin) in place, I believe that the sheer existence of this significant issue is hurting the industry in general, in particular programmatic, through the total allocated budgets as well as through the continued funding of criminal operations which fuels even more advanced fraud, such as malware, hacking, DDOS attacks and the like. We hope that this initiative will act as a catalyst to expand the commission's focus to ultimately tackle these problems as well."


To learn more about Adform, IAB Europe and the European Commission’s battle against IPR infringement, or our own Fraud Detection solutions, please contact Jakob Bak here.


Further information on the event can be found here.

Read the original article here.

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