Company also introduces four anti-spam best practices to benefit the digital advertising industry
“Whitelists, blacklists, viewability and visibility are all essentially table stakes for brand advertisers and publishers”
With these latest advancements, YuMe has rolled sophisticated fraud detection capabilities into PQI, to address:
- impression scam – in which fraudulent publishers send out bogus ad requests
- ad stacking – in which ads are stacked onto a single out-of-view or below-the-fold ad
- click-fraud – in which bots do the clicking
YuMe’s PQI already provides composite inventory grading for factors such as video player size, content association and device type, while improving brand lift, video completion rate (VCR) and a number of other measures, including fraud detection. However, this latest improvement will give advertisers additional transparency into inventory quality. This is all possible because of the software YuMe embeds across its inventory partner screens – the YuMe SDK.
“Whitelists, blacklists, viewability and visibility are all essentially table stakes for brand advertisers and publishers,” said Simon Hayhurst, SVP of Products, YuMe. “But the single, most important problem in our industry today is correctly identifying and matching audiences to ads, and understanding the quality of an impression every time, on every publisher – which is why we developed PQI.”
Publishers are continually susceptible to 3rd party bots, and bots are becoming increasingly difficult to detect. With this fraud detection enhancement, YuMe employs machine learning, mimicking human behavior, to downgrade fraudulent inventory right out of its system.
YuMe also pre-screens publishers, and uses a combination of quantitative methods such as PQI along with human screening, to identify the true quality of each impression and ensure that advertisers reach real audiences.
“YuMe wants to ensure that there’s a human behind every impression,” said Jayant Kadambi, CEO and Co-founder, YuMe. “These improvements to our fraud detection system and PQI, combined with our newly-launched anti-spam best practices, will provide an essential layer of comfort for those planning media buys or monetizing ad inventory.”
Reducing Spam Through Digital Video Best Practices
As an additional method of combating fraud, YuMe is offering a set of definitive best practices for the ad industry to promote transparency, brand safety, combat spam and ultimately improve placement quality and viewability. These new guidelines serve to address the many concerns voiced within the digital video advertising space: suspicious inventory, bot-driven traffic, non-viewable ads, auto-play ads that appear below-the-fold, in-banner video ads and hidden ads with no sound.
YuMe defined the four key guidelines, for both advertisers and publishers, as:
1) Video ad inventory should employ a proactive grading system. Placement quality improves by employing a grading system which focuses on brand safety, tracks current and historical brand safety violations, video player size and location (including clutter and competing ads around the player) and proactively blocks ads in violation.
2) Video ad reporting should include blacklist and whitelist features. Strict reporting features ensure that requests consistently come from appropriate sites and are not delivered on digital publishers that are not approved advertisers.
3) Video advertising should be viewable and visible. Ad viewability is a critical pillar to successful ad placement, assuring that video ads are only served when video players are being watched by a real human being. A visible video ad is essential to deliver the intended brand impact.
4) Video ad inventory should be delivered with a software development kit (SDK). SDKs target player size and location, and help with domain and app monitoring – all of which are better for spam control and brand safety.
About YuMe
YuMe, Inc. is a leading provider of digital video brand advertising solutions. Its proprietary data-science driven technologies and large audience footprint drive inventory monetization and enable advertisers to reach targeted, brand receptive audiences across a wide range of Internet-connected devices. Designed to serve the specific needs of brand advertising, YuMe’s technology platform simplifies the complexities associated with delivering effective digital video advertising campaigns in today’s highly-fragmented market. YuMe (NYSE: YUME) is headquartered in Redwood City, CA with European headquarters in London and nine additional offices worldwide. For more information, visit YuMe.com/pr, follow @YuMeVideo and like YuMe on Facebook. Current YuMe logos can be found at www.yume.com/news/logos.
YuMe, PQI and Placement Quality Index are trademarks of YuMe. All other brands, products or service names are or may be trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
