Fraudlogix

Rethinking Brand Safety: Focus on Proven Success, Not Verification

Data-Driven Thinking argues that most marketers don’t need brand safety verification. While recognizing IVT and fraud challenges, the piece contends that strict, broad brand-safety regimes can be wasteful and may block valuable inventory. It recommends focusing on the platforms, sites, and apps where campaigns have proven success rather than broad exclusion lists or keyword buckets. The article cites use-case-specific tools such as GeoEdge, Fraudlogix, and Fraud0 to address IVT, and notes Ad Fontes as a resource to identify publishers with low bias and high reliability. It references research by Stagwell and HarrisX showing ads next to hard-news topics performed as well as those next to sports or entertainment, and mentions Meta’s shift to a Community Notes model. The author argues that measuring cross-channel conversions, incrementality, and media-mix modeling should be higher priorities for most marketers than brand safety alone.

Viewability Record in UK; IAB Tech Lab Acquires DigiTrust - ExchangeWire.com

UK ad viewability hit a new high in Q1 2018, with viewability rising from 56% to 59% and an average view time of 25.8 seconds; display ads at half-page size reached 66% viewability and 25.5 seconds. The report notes four straight quarters of growth and a shift toward quality over quantity. In parallel, IAB Tech Lab announced the acquisition of DigiTrust, integrating its real-time identity service into IAB’s standards; Jordan Mitchell, founder and CEO of DigiTrust, will join to lead integration and broader strategy. MetaX unveiled a live adChain whitelist, a blockchain-based, community-vetted list of verified publisher domains; adTokens will be used to vote, with contextual data available to buyers. Appodeal secured USD 8 million (£5.7 million) in funding led by Impulse VC, with plans for a Minsk development office. Fraudlogix and PubNative announced a partnership to fight ad fraud with pre-bid filtering.

£3.4bn Programmatic Ad Spend in 2017; Guardian Partners with Improve Digital - ExchangeWire.com

The article examines UK programmatic advertising in 2017 and beyond, citing eMarketer forecasts of £3.39bn in 2017 spend (up 23.5% from 2016) and a 79.0% share of UK digital display ad spend for programmatic, rising toward 84.5% by 2019. It notes mobile's dominance, with 78.0% of programmatic display spend in 2017 and a projected 86.5% by 2019. Guardian News & Media has partnered with Improve Digital to use its SSP, alongside existing partners such as OpenX, after ending its Rubicon Project relationship. Fraudlogix is adding ads.txt verification to its dashboard, aligning with DSPs including DoubleClick Bid Manager, AppNexus, The Trade Desk, MediaMath, Adobe Advertising Cloud, and DataXu. The piece also highlights GDPR-related investment activity across Europe, and Smart is implementing ads.txt domain verification to ensure inventory quality.