Digital Media Is In The Spotlight; And Bad Actors Are Hurting Our Reviews

Have you heard? Digital Media has a fraud problem. A $7 Billion dollar problem. Or is it a $16 billion dollar problem? With numbers that eye-watering it hardly matters. Bots, click fraud, ad stuffing and domain spoofing are terms that have become part of the daily discourse in the digital media ecosystem. And some of the world’s biggest advertisers are sick of it. The digital ad ecosystem has been told to get in shape or get cut out.

If you can spare half an hour, here’s the speech that accelerated the current transparency certification frenzy.

The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) has emerged as the de facto 3rd party verification agency for publishers, advertisers and intermediaries (i.e. SSPs, DSPs, etc.) looking to prove themselves as honorable actors in the supply chain. TAG has developed a series of certification programs to validate digital media companies’ compliance with a set of standards required to fight Fraud, Malware, Piracy and ensure Inventory Quality.

Prior to being able to apply for and receive certification for any of these programs, a company must first be Verified by TAG . Once verified, a company receives a TAG-ID – a unique, global and persistent identifier – and is listed in the TAG Registry. Any participant in the digital media supply chain can verify the legitimacy of a partner company by entering company name in a lookup tool.

“The TAG Registry makes that possible, providing a Who’s Who of trusted partners for any company involved in digital advertising, and creating a protected system of supply chain participants and other advertising technology companies that demonstrate their commitment to higher standards of transparency and disclosure to their partners.”

JUICE Mobile has been a TAG Verified company as of July 19, 2017.

While an important first step in providing more transparency to the digital media ecosystem, pursuing additional TAG certification seals is critical to fully weed out bad actors. JUICE’s immediate priority is Certification Against Fraud (CAF).

To achieve compliance with TAG CAF, a verified company must implement and formally attest to meeting a set of set compliance standards. These standards are then audited on a quarterly basis. Below are the requirements for an intermediary as this is the certification this is more relevant to JUICE’s role in the supply chain.

• Be a TAG Registered company in good standing
• Designate a TAG Compliance Officer
• Comply with MRC Invalid Traffic filtering guidelines of all inventory handled by the company
• Employ Domain List filtering
• Employ Data Center IP list filtering
• Implement TAG’s Payment ID protocol (a “follow the money” ID chain).

It was important for us to pursue TAG CAF as it aligns with our overall approach to inventory management. Our programmatic direct platform works exclusively with top North American publishers and provides 99.5% valid human traffic as measured by MOAT. Our DSP has been working with Integral Ad Science, an MRC accredited company for Invalid Traffic, since late 2016 to provide brand safety filtering for client campaigns. This is a priority for JUICE and we expect to be in full compliance and receive our seal of accreditation within Q4 2017.

For our clients, this means they should have total confidence their campaigns will run in brand safe environments and in the elimination of any wasted spend due to fraudulent activity within the supply chain.

Which is how it should be.