Dive Brief:
- GroupM and the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) are partnering to require GroupM media partners to get certified with TAG’s anti-piracy guidelines.
- GroupM’s reasoning is pirated content is part of a continuum that leads to ad fraud and malware distribution.
- The Trustworthy Accountability Group was recently created by the IAB, ANA and 4As to stop fraudulent ad bots at the source.
Dive Insight:
"The people who create pirate sites are the same ones who perpetrate clickbot fraud – they’re the ones who spread malware and create the armies of bots that generate most of the automated clicks in the business," John Montgomery, chairman of GroupM Connect, North America, and co-chair of the Trustworthy Accountability Group’s (TAG) anti-piracy working group, told Ad Exchanger.
To address this issue GroupM and TAG are partnering to require anti-piracy certification from media partners before being declared a Digital Advertising Assurance Provider (DAAP).
In the same article, Mike Zaneis, president and CEO of TAG, and EVP and general counsel at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, was quoted saying, "There hasn’t been much awareness of the connection between those three things (ad fraud, piracy and malware). When we first started TAG, people said to us, ‘You’ve got to solve fraud,’ but we recognized early on that all of these criminal acts are connected – piracy is just one link in a chain of criminal activity. It’s the seed that grows into ad fraud."
