Association of Online Publishers and The Media Trust Launch UK’s First Ad Quality and Malware Prevention Co-Operative

AOP members receive exclusive discount on The Media Trust’s real-time monitoring and detection services, which protect against malvertising and assure digital ad quality.

London, UK ‒ The Media Trust, the global leader in monitoring and protecting the online and mobile advertising ecosystem, announces a partnership with AOP, the UK’s Association of Online Publishers, to help support publishers in gaining control over ads served on their sites, mitigate ad fraud, and improve the overall reader experience.

The co-operative—the first of its kind—will provide AOP members with a significant discount on SMART, The Media Trust’s comprehensive suite of monitoring, detecting and alerting services, which helps protect publishers, media-oriented websites, and mobile apps against web-based malvertising and assures digital ad quality, performance, and data privacy.

“I’m very excited to be working with the AOP and the UK’s top premium publishers to bring malware prevention, data transparency, and ad quality assurance to the market,” said Matt O’Neill, GM Europe at The Media Trust. “This consortium offers a uniquely exclusive opportunity for publishers to curtail ad block installs, prevent data leakage and theft, reduce operational costs and overheads, and ensure a better ad experience for their readers and users.”

Richard Reeves, Managing Director at AOP, commented: “Tools that enable premium publishers to protect both users and themselves from the increasing risk of malicious software are essential in today’s digital publishing ecosystem. We welcome the opportunity to partner with The Media Trust and offer AOP members exclusive cost benefits, which will help to remove entry barriers for services that not only detect ad fraud, but also create a better user experience for readers.”

Chris Olson, The Media Trust’s CEO and co-founder, added: “Ad blockers exist because the digital advertising supply chain failed to address the growing number of poorly performing or misplaced ads. Consumers have clearly run out of patience, so it’s critical media publishers implement the policies, processes and technology that ensure they only serve high quality ads, which are free of malware and always perform as intended. Only SMART can provide continuous, 24/7 quality assurance that detects and alerts—in real time—on all industry and client-specific policy violations related to malware, data leakage and privacy, and creative/technical performance.”

The Media Trust programme provides real-time control by enabling the continuous, 24/7 enforcement of all security, IT, data privacy and creative policies to each ad served. As a result, digital publishers gain granular visibility of and continuous control over the ads served to their site, streamline their incident response processes, ensure revenue continuity and deliver a consistently positive brand experience for both themselves and their advertisers.

The only solution of its kind, SMART leverages The Media Trust’s comprehensive suite of ad tag monitoring and alerting services to provide a holistic creative quality assurance solution. Powered by the company’s proprietary scanning technology, which has been in continual operation since 2005, these services scan more than 30 million ad tags and millions of websites each day. As a result, this unprecedented view of the global digital advertising ecosystem allows The Media Trust to leverage and continuously build the industry’s most comprehensive, up-to-date database of creative and technical policies covering security, data leakage, ad quality and ad performance.

About Association of Online Publishers

The UK Association of Online Publishers (AOP) is an industry body representing digital publishing companies that create original, branded, quality content. AOP champions the interests of media owners from diverse backgrounds including newspaper and magazine publishing, TV and radio broadcasting, and pure online media.

For more information, visit www.ukaop.org

About The Media Trust

The Media Trust works with the world’s largest, most-heavily trafficked digital properties to provide real-time security, first-party data protection and privacy, performance management and quality assurance solutions that help protect, monetise and optimise the user experience across desktop, smartphone, tablet and gaming devices.

As the global leader in monitoring the online and mobile ecosystems, The Media Trust leverages a physical presence in 65 countries and 500 cities around the globe to continuously scan websites, ad tags and mobile apps and alert on anomalies affecting websites and visitors alike. More than 500 publishers, ad networks, exchanges, agencies and corporates—including 40 of comScore’s AdFocus Top 50 websites—rely on The Media Trust to protect their website, their employee internet use, their revenue and, most importantly, their brand.