Connected television has become the latest front in the fight against advertising fraud as scammers target a relatively new platform with high prices compared with other media outlets.
IAB Tech Lab has played a key part in establishing technical standards to make the CTV ad marketplace safer for brands and spur growth in automated media buying. The group has years of experience in similar efforts for website and mobile media.
“We absolutely have lessons learned from other platforms like web and mobile that we bring with us to CTV,” Jill Wittkopp, vice president of president at IAB Tech Lab, said in this interview with Beet.TV.
One of its most widely adopted standards is ads.txt, Authorized Digital Sellers, that helps publishers authenticate who’s allowed to sell their inventory amid complexities of the programmatic media ecosystem. Its app-ads.txt standard for advertising in mobile apps was adopted for CTV.
IAB Tech Lab also has a standard called ads.cert to authenticate connections between buyers and sellers, include those who use server-side ad insertion (SSAI) to place ads in a video server before they’re sent to a viewing device.
“This helps with adding a layer of cryptographic security to messages that are sent server to server,” Wittkopp said. “It’s something really important in fighting fraud to make sure that you’re receiving a notice of impression or a notice of billing from an authenticated party.”
The tech lab’s Cryptographic Security Group is working on a project known as “authenticated devices” to help prevent device spoofing, such as a mobile phone that pretends to be a smart TV.
“When someone is buying a CTV impression, there’s an opportunity for misrepresentation,” Wittkopp said. “We have tremendous opportunity in the CTV environment in really thinking about more than just connected TVs and thinking about what does advanced TV mean.”
You are watching “Protecting CTV Media Investment From Ad Fraud,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by HUMAN. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
