The Media Trust Confirms Its Clients are 100% Compliant with the Trustworthy Accountability Group’s Newly Released Malware Scanning Guidelines for Digital Ads

The Media Trust’s suite of SaaS-based services conducts continuous, real-time quality assurance checks on each ad tag’s technical and creative components, ensuring they are always 100% malware free

McLean, VA ‒ The Media Trust [www.themediatrust.com], the global leader in monitoring and protecting the online and mobile advertising ecosystem, today announced its comprehensive support for the Trustworthy Accountability Group’s (TAG) [https://tagtoday.net/wg/malware/] newly released malware scanning guidelines [https://tagtoday.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Scanning-Creative-for-Malware-Oct-2016.pdf] to help eliminate malware from the digital ad supply chain. Co-created by the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s), Association of National Advertisers (ANA), and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), TAG is a cross-industry initiative created to focus on four key areas: combating malware, eliminating fraudulent traffic, fighting ad-supported Internet piracy and promoting transparency. TAG’s Anti-Malware Working Group consists of senior executives from more than 50 key players in the digital advertising ecosystem, including The Media Trust, who came together to develop these malware scanning guidelines. These guidelines focus on the need to continuously scan ad tags and associated landing pages for malware both pre-launch and in flight, specifically noting that a one-time scan is never sufficient because an ad tag can be repeatedly compromised as it travels through the digital advertising ecosystem.

Upon the release of these guidelines earlier today, hundreds of The Media Trust’s malware-scanning clients, which include digital publishers, ad network and exchanges, Demand Side Platforms (DSP), Supply Side Platforms (SSP) and ad agencies, instantly became 100% compliant. The Media Trust’s SMART [https://www.themediatrust.com/ad-creative-governance.php] program, which is a suite of monitoring and alerting services, provides comprehensive support for these guidelines through the continuous scanning and inspection of each ad tag’s technical and creative components from a multitude of different user profiles—which consist of a wide variety of device type, OS, geography and user behavior combinations—deployed across the online, mobile and gaming ecosystems. Through this unparalleled use of highly sophisticated user profiles, The Media Trust detects and alerts on malware in real time or near real time across all major ad formats, including HTML5, rich media, video and native. SMART can also scan tags both pre-launch and in flight as well as monitor for any in-flight changes made to the ad’s technical components. In continual operation since 2005, SMART’s SaaS-based services scan more than 30 million ad tags and millions of websites each day, providing an unprecedented view of the online and mobile advertising ecosystems, which enables the real-time detection and alerting of malware instances no other provider can or does.

“Since 2005, The Media Trust has provided the online and mobile advertising ecosystems with real-time monitoring, detection and alerting services that ensure ad tags are always 100% malware free, regardless of the consumer’s platform, geography, operating system or digital behavior,” said Chris Olson, The Media Trust’s CEO and a member of TAG’s Anti-Malware Working Group. “The depth and breadth of our SaaS-based services not only allow us to instantly meet these current guidelines, but also exceed them. And it’s important to note we have successfully done so for the past 11 years.”

The Media Trust’s SMART program ensures each ad tag is not only compliant with a client’s malware/security policies, but also compliant with their data privacy, behavior and performance policies as well as all government regulations both in the U.S. and elsewhere. Designed to continuously scan, measure, analyze, resolve and track creative quality, SMART enables clients and their various upstream partners in the digital advertising supply chain to block and then remediate—in real time—any malicious, disruptive or non-compliant ad. When an ad exceeds a policy threshold, SMART immediately flags the ad and sends the client a real-time alert, which contains the information needed to resolve the violation.

With SMART, digital publishers gain real-time control over the ads served to their audience, while also realizing improved revenue continuity, reduced labor costs associated with the manual review and remediation of an ad, and enhanced communication and collaboration across the ad-serving supply chain.

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, monetize and optimize 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.