Beet.TV recently interviewed Index Exchange’s Rob Hazan for a new leadership series, Protecting CTV Media Investment From Ad Fraud presented by HUMAN.
Stronger guards against ad fraud in connection television will help to expand automated media buying as marketers can feel confident about their efforts to reach bigger audiences. While they can negotiate one-to-one deals with publishers, they face certain limitations.
“One proxy that a lot of buyers use for creating some safety in CTV is one-to-one deals, and while that works reasonably well from an antifraud and safety perspective, they don’t manage to reap the full rewards of programmatic buying when they buy that way,” Rob Hazan, senior director of product at ad-tech company Index Exchange, said in this interview with Beet.TV.
“The scale and the reach that they can get through programmatic and the audiences that they can tap into are a little bit harder to reach through one-to-one deals.”
Index Exchange participates in industry efforts to reduce or eliminate fraudulent activity in the automated marketplace for television advertising. It belongs to several working groups at the IAB Technology Laboratory, which helps to develop common technological standards for digital advertising. The IAB Tech Lab’s app-ads.txt initiative to prevent internet fraud is being adapted for CTV advertising.
“We have supply standards of our own that we enforce of course where we only work directly with publishers and we don’t buy from resellers,” Hazan said. “We don’t make inventory from resellers available for DSPs on our exchange to buy.”
Industry Initiatives to Stop Fraud
Index Exchange is collaborating with industry partners to propose cryptographic standards that authenticate the device, the seller and the senders of billing notifications such as server-side ad insertion (SSAI) vendors. This will help to give buyers greater confidence in the legitimacy of transactions from high-quality suppliers.
“We’ve also been pretty heavily involved at the Security Foundations Working Group, which is starting to define some cryptographic standards to give buyers irrefutable proof that they’re getting what they think they’re getting,” Hazan said. “There’s other up-and-coming standards as well, including authenticated devices and authenticated delivery, all of which are intended to communicate to buyers where the inventory originated.”
He said he expects to see further advancements in these efforts in the next year.
“Folks are really working together to realize the potential of programmatic. So, in the next six months or so, I expect that folks will continue doing that,” Hazan said. “Some of the new standards that we are defining will actually come to fruition and become finalized specs that media owners and publishers can start to adopt.”
You can watch all videos in the series here.
