Screen grab from The Sun+
The Sun’s exposé on brands appearing on illegal and offensive websites has sent nervous ripples through the sector – but Adloox’s CEO, Marco Ricci, says these mistakes could have been prevented.
At the DMEXCO conference in Cologne in 2014, Adloox handed out coffee cups to the attendees, emblazoned with the caption ‘Why don’t you care?’. It was a teaser question, which we then elaborated on during our presentation to brands and their agencies.
If you don’t protect against fraud, brand safety and poor viewability collectively at the most granular level, you are wasting serious money. It’s why some verification tools report 55% viewability, where another will claim 35%.
This ‘delta’ between the two numbers is not caused by the quality of viewability of each company. Most passed the MRC accreditation for this. It’s caused by these tools ranging in their ability to detect the inappropriate content at a lower, hidden level and therefore many are claiming ‘viewable’ when the truth is actually ‘fraud’. This 20% delta in inefficiency is letting bad sites slip through the net, and brands are paying for it.
Media companies are employing content verification companies, yes, but they’re not pushing them to do the job they should be paid to do. Instead, they are charging a ‘monitoring fee’, sporadically checking the campaign’s progress and overall performance – a bit like closing one eye on what’s really happening.
I just don’t understand this. If you employ a premium brand safety tool, its main job is to keep your brands safe. It should be a complete service, fully auditing every ad impression, weeding out inefficiency at all levels, even the most granular, hidden fraud, as I’ve written about before.
It is useless implementing (and paying) a verification company if they/you intend only to monitor the umbrella inventory. It’s the equivalent of buying a burglar alarm to protect your home, spending days setting up the sensor cameras and gadgets in every room but then never turning it on.
Let’s be realistic. Ads from Cillit Bang and British Gas etc. did not serve millions of impressions on bestiality sites. Most were caught, and blocked. The real issue is ‘why’ a couple of ad calls slipped through, which leads to the wider issue of hidden malpractice, and why these verification tools aren’t spotting them.
I’ll keep saying it until I’m blue in the face. Fraudsters are smart. And they’re hiding deep underground. Just having a bot crawler to look through millions/billions of domains, and boxing what they find into brand safety pre-defined categories is not enough anymore. Fraud (in its many guises) would require a full category list alone. You need a full-scale forensics team to sense-check these domains, and spot anomalies or websites that require further manual investigation. Auditing = accuracy.
You have two choices. Either you rigidly stick to a whitelist-only mentality, whereby your client’s ads can only appear on the quality sites within this whitelist (all other bids/delivery would be prevented, although this can be restrictive).
Or, you simply do verification properly. No more airy-fairy monitoring, but detailed, log-level auditing and sense-checking of the domains and sub-domains that are masquerading as relevant/premium content.
We’ve seen examples of sites changing their referrer name daily to escape capture, claiming to be YouTube or eBay, when in fact they are foreign, fake websites. We’ve seen just this week that having the word ‘dog’ in your brand slogan can slip you onto an animal sex forum, if not detected.
So attention to detail, with a fine-tooth-comb approach to verification is sorely needed. It’s clearly lacking in some areas.
