Integrations with Partners Include Turn and Over 15 Others
NEW YORK, NY – Integral Ad Science, the technology company dedicated to ensuring brand safe and high quality media environments, today announced that its programmatic pre-bid solution for online advertising fraud is now available via Turn and AppNexus. Integral’s solution is also leveraged by other leading companies in the industry including Chango, Federated Media, Magnetic, Media6Degrees, Media IQ, Netmining, PulsePoint, SHEKNOWS and ValueClick. MediaMath, The Trade Desk, BrandScreen, Digilant, QUISMA and several others are in the process of being fully integrated to provide the highest level of media quality and brand safety against a variety of fraudulent practices, such as click and impression fraud and botnet impressions.
Integral’s Suspicious Activity Detection product, released in 2012 to help the industry solve what AdWeek recently cited as a $400M annual problem, scores web pages to determine the risk of fraudulent or deceptive activity and proactively blocks ads in real time, before they appear on highly suspicious pages. The latest solution and integration with partners now enables brands and marketers to leverage predictive data in a programmatic pre-bid environment, to avoid bidding on fraudulent or highly suspicious inventory.
The industry generally defines fraud as the deliberate practice of attempting to serve advertisements that have no potential to be viewed by a human user. This includes botnet traffic, iFrame stuffing into a 1×1 pixel and ad stacking, which places multiple ads on top of one other in a single ad placement, with only the top ad in view. Despite some industry misconceptions, fraud is not adware, poor viewability placements or low-quality inventory.
Impression fraud and related techniques impact marketing budgets in a variety of ways. First, any advertiser paying for media on a CPM basis is paying for all of this fraudulent inventory. Other examples include:
Click Fraud: Programmatic clicking and unusual click activity, which is both deceptive, as it skews actual results, and detrimental to the bottom line in ads purchased on a CPC basis.
Attribution Fraud: Fraudulent activity stealing credit for sales within a CPA or CPV campaign, despite the fact that the ad impressions were not real and/or not in view. The theft is occurring as dollars funnel away from legitimate channels towards fraudulent ones who have placed the most/latest cookies before consumer purchase.
Compounding the issue, Integral’s data science reveals that if one form of fraud is present, additional fraudulent practices are often uncovered on the same page.
Integral’s suspicious activity technology encompasses analysis of each individual ad call (approximately two billion per day), and its solutions assess:
- Real time signals – Anomalies in a real-time ad call that are highly unlikely to have happened, as compared to legitimate activity.
- Cumulative evidence – Inconsistencies and/or suspicious activity across all the activity associated with a website or group of websites, user or group of users, leveraging over four years of technology, data science and machine learning capabilities.
- Predictive insights – Historic intelligence that flags a page with a high percentage of traffic coming from fraudulent sites, allowing advertisers to block ads or avoid bidding on impressions as necessary.
“We believe that black lists and other forms of published fraud reports would make the problem worse,” said Will Luttrell, CTO of Integral Ad Science. “These efforts would notify bad actors that they have been caught, at which point they simply register a new domain and continue their fraudulent activity. It is imperative that any and all solutions proposed to tackle fraud are proactive, predictive and both pre- and post-bid. This was our objective when we built our Suspicious Activity Detection last year, and it continues to be our focus as we integrate more partners into our pre-bid capabilities.”
“We leverage Integral Ad Science’s Suspicious Activity Detection to vet publisher domains before allowing them into the Federated Media network as well as against our ‘in production’ ad traffic to help combat the inherently dynamic nature of fraud,” said Tom Hart, VP of Ad Operations at Federated Media Publishing. “By applying their suspicious activity score in both the publisher on-boarding (pre) and ad delivery process (post), we’re taking active measures to ensure that brand advertising is protected from fraudulent activity and served to actual human readers.”
For more information, visit: http://integralads.com/our-solutions/ad-exposure.
About Integral Ad Science
Integral Ad Science is a technology company focused on ensuring safe, quality media environments for online advertisers. Employing the industry’s only media valuation platform, Integral Ad Science evaluates the media environment and establishes a TRAQ Score (True Advertising Quality), a first-of-its kind, quantifiable measure of media quality that ultimately benefits every media buyer, seller, publisher and trading platform. TRAQ score supports an advertisers’ ability to plan, execute and target their audience in an environment that reflects their brand image and drives ROI, while simultaneously setting benchmarks for publishers who wish to improve the quality of their content and design to attract premium advertisers. Integral is headquartered in New York with operations in San Francisco, London, Tokyo and Sydney. Learn more at http://www.integralads.com.
