As more brands buying ads programmatically have found their ads appearing against unappealing and unintended content, the problem has given rise to yet more technology solutions.
Ad measurement firms like Moat, Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify now offer products rating the quality of the environments in which brands’ ads are served.
For Wayne Gatinella, CEO of DoubleVerify, which started a decade ago, the problem is now more prescient than ever.
“With the advent of fake news, of content that’s purposely created solely for the goal of attracting users and advertisers without necessarily the quality that defines legitimate content and news, as we expect it, the trust and transparency in the digital ecosystem breaks down,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“We’re now seeing brand safety, digital ad fraud, and the need for a viewable measurement as a critical component of evaluating the performance of every inventory source that they use.”
The “brand safety” concerns are lingering because of well-documented cases in which certain advertisers’ creative was showing against content deemed offensive or unsavory.
Technology platforms – which have already added algorithms to tackle ad fraud, viewability and more – are also racing to offer brand safety solutions, often through blocking of content containing flagged keywords and, latterly, with “artificial intelligence”.
Ensuring ads can be delivered cleanly is paramount to Gatinella. Whilst chatter swirls about the pendulum swinging away from advertising – as these problems persist and as subscription content explodes – he believes ads are fundamental.
“I firmly believe that a free internet is what originally created the backbone of online content and sharing,” he adds. “I absolutely believe that by creating a trust and transparency that we each expect when we log in, can support an ad-supported internet.”
This video was recorded at the annual DMS conference presented by LUMA Partners.
This video is part of a series titled The Consumer First, a New Era in Digital Media presented by MediaMath. For more from the series, please visit this page.
