IAB Tech Lab releases tool to combat programmatic ad fraud

Dive Brief:

The Interactive Advertising Bureau is seeking to clean up and clarify programmatic advertising, according to two organization press releases made available to Marketing Dive.
The industry group released “An Evolving Framework for Advertising Automation” in a bid to bring clarity around programmatic functions as well as spark conversation between buyers, sellers and tech vendors. The purpose of the paper is to create a vocabulary shift from “programmatic” to “automation.”
The IAB Tech Lab also released a new tool called ads.txt designed to eliminate the black market for digital advertising inventory by preventing the sale of counterfeit and unauthorized impressions in programmatic transactions.

Dive Insight:

Ad fraud has long been a concern in digital advertising overall, and the issue is more acute in programmatic given its automated nature. Forrester Research recently found that U.S. marketers spent as much as $7.4 billion on low-quality ads in 2016, 56% of which went to either fraudulent or unviewable inventory.

The IAB ads.text tool is a pre-formatted index of authorized sellers that publishers can post to their domains to allow programmatic buyers to screen for fake or misrepresented inventory. The tool addresses an industry issue given voice by P&G’s Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard with his challenge to ad vendors to clean up the media supply chain. The tool can “take both the ‘fake Rolexes’ of digital ad inventory and our industry’s ‘luxury handbags that fell off the back of a truck’ out of circulation,” said Alanna Gombert, Senior Vice President, Technology and Ad Operations, IAB, and General Manager, IAB Tech Lab, in a press release.

The IAB’s bid to redefine the process as automated rather than programmatic stems from a desire to be more specific about the full range of underlying programmatic processes, tasks and platforms according to Dennis Buchheim, Senior Vice President, Data and Ad Effectiveness. The release stated that nearly 80% of digital display advertising is expected to be automated this year.