Advertising Technology

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) this week released the “State of Viewability Transaction 2015,” a position paper offering the digital media and advertising industries guidance on how to manage the shift of digital media's “audience currency” to 100 percent viewability.

The IAB statement heralds the collaboration among the digital trade association, the ANA, and the 4As that has stewarded the historic change in advertising measurement, but labels 2015 a “year of transition,” and calls on advertising agencies, publishers, marketers, and advertising technology companies to work together to assure the new currency can be implemented by all companies in the digital advertising ecosystem. The paper reiterates a statement made in October by the Media Rating Council (MRC), the organization charged by the industry with managing the Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) processes, that 100 percent viewability is “unreasonable for advertisers, agencies and publishers implementing viewable impressions as measurement currency to expect to observe viewable rates of 100% in analyses of their campaigns.”

“It's time to set the record straight about what is technically and commercially feasible, in order to get ourselves on an effective road to 100 percent viewability and greater accountability for digital media,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO, IAB. “The MRC said it best – 100 percent is currently unreasonable. Why? Because, different ad units, browsers, ad placements, vendors and measurement methodologies yield wildly different viewability numbers.”

“Publishers, agencies, marketers, and ad tech companies can resolve these differences by working collaboratively to make measurement make sense. We won't do it by holding guns to each others' heads,” he added.

To foster stronger collaboration and build trust, the IAB recommends that marketers, agencies, and publishers adhere to the following seven principles during 2015:

1. All billing should continue to be based on the number of Served Impressions during a campaign and these should be separated into two categories: Measured and Non-Measured.
2. Given the limitations of current technology, and the publisher observed variances in measurement of 30-40%, it is recommended that in this year of transition, Measured Impressions be held to a 70% viewability threshold.
3. If a campaign does not achieve the 70% viewability threshold for Measured Impressions, publishers should be willing to make good with additional Viewable Impressions until the threshold is met. Such a guarantee assures that all paid measurable ad impressions will be viewable at a threshold that both exceeds the minimum standard and falls within observed variances.
4. All make-goods should be in the form of additional Viewable Impressions, not cash, and should be delivered in a reasonable time frame. Make-good impressions should be both Viewable and generally consistent with inventory that was purchased in the original campaign. Determination of threshold achievement is based on total campaign impressions, not by each line item. In other words, some line items may not achieve threshold, but others can compensate.
5. For large format ads, defined as 242,500 pixels or over, a Viewable Impression is counted if 30% of the pixels of the ad are viewable for a minimum of one continuous second, as noted in the “MRC Viewable Ad Impression Measurement Guidelines.”
6. All transactions between buyers and sellers should use MRC accredited vendors only.
7. A buyer and a seller should agree on a single measurement vendor ahead of time. The industry aspires to variances of no more than 10% between viewability measures provided by different vendors. All stakeholders must avoid costly, labor-intensive, error-prone manual processes of reconciling different sets of viewability numbers, hence the benefits of agreeing on a single vendor.

“The entire industry came together to provide true accountability through a single viewability measurement,” said Jason Kint, CEO, Digital Content Next (formerly the Online Publishers Association). “At this point in time, it's critical that all parties adhere to the MRC standard and provide for a period of transition while the systems catch up. On behalf of all premium publishers, I commend the IAB's shepherding the industry through this phase.”

To read the entire “State of Viewability Transaction 2015” statement, go to http://www.iab.net/viewability.

About the IAB
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) empowers the media and marketing industries to thrive in the digital economy. It is comprised of more than 650 leading media and technology companies that are responsible for selling, delivering, and optimizing digital advertising or marketing campaigns. Together, they account for 86 percent of online advertising in the United States. Working with its member companies, the IAB evaluates and recommends standards and practices and fields critical research on interactive advertising. The organization is committed to professional development, elevating the knowledge, skills, and expertise of individuals across the digital marketing industry. The IAB also educates marketers, agencies, media companies and the wider business community about the value of interactive advertising. Founded in 1996, the IAB is headquartered in New York City.

As it turns out, ad fraud knows no strangers.

A comprehensive study by the Association of National Advertisers, focusing heavily on bot traffic, illustrated the extent to which a surprise group of publishers were part of the ad fraud game.

Previously thought to be above the fray when it comes to ad fraud, it was discovered that a large percentage of it occurred on premium publisher sites.

Traffic from premium publishers consists of almost 20 percent bots. While much of that can be linked to sourced traffic, often it's the publishers who are victims of ad-fraud attacks, according to the study which was released by the ANA in conjunction with WhiteOps, a platform for reducing fraud traffic.

One of the top methods used to attack a website and use its legitimate traffic for fraud was ad injection, when a browser plug-in “inserts” ads into publishers' sites, without permission and without payment to those publishers. To a buyer that has whitelisted a particular domain, it looks like that domain's inventory when, in fact, it isn't. In many cases the ad may be hidden — a pop-up/under, an overlay, etc. — and the performance (or lack there of) is credited to that domain though the publisher of that domain has no control of or benefit from the impression(s).

One case study showed that more than 500,000 ads were injected daily on a top-tier publisher's site. Ads were found to have even been injected on subscriptions-based sites that promise an ad-free environment for users.

Injected ads also ruin the user experience, cause slower load times, and deliver an overabundance of ads (often highly-intrusive to the user). This type of ad injection is just as bad (if not worse) for the user as it is for the publisher, especially considering the infection is often rooted in the user's computer.

“(These) ads were displayed using malware illicitly installed on residential computers,” the report stated. “Victims of malware-driven ad injection inadvertently expose private information. Malware-driven ad injection software on the victim's computer allows potentially malicious, unknown actors to gain access to personally identifiable information (PII), including browsing history, interests, and financial information.”

Publishers receive no money for ads injected on their site, as the payment for those served ads goes instead to the operator of the malware.

One way publishers can protect themselves is through the use of true domain technology, which “identifies the actual domain on which an ad displays, rather than the domain reported by the ad server, which can be falsified,” the report said.

Copying content from premium sites and selling ads around that content is another form of ad fraud that harms publishers, where fraudsters set up bogus sites with stolen content that still manage to get some amount of human traffic (along with sourced traffic that also can include bots). Of the most bot-trafficked sites in the study, 22 percent were found to have had duplicated content. Fraudsters set up a website, and can sometimes rip off a legitimate publisher's content in bulk in order to draw search traffic away from the original publisher. Ads are served on that site, to bots and humans alike, and the ad revenue goes to the thief instead of the original publisher of the work.

The first step in protecting yourself from this type of fraud is to be aware if your content is being stolen. Hubspot has a great rundown about ways to find out. Taking it a step further, KissMetrics illustrates ways you can combat content theft.

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Download a copy of the full report here.