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The IAB Believes...brand safety scepticism

by Arno Hummerston , 25.08.2015

Last week, the IAB posted the first of their five “IAB Believes…” blog pieces, focusing on brand safety. In this first piece, they focus on the bad PR when an ad is delivered in inappropriate places and there is a passing reference to the spend that is wasted. The solution pushed by the IAB is signing up to Digital Trading Standards Group (DTSG)’s Good Practice Principles.

This is great! As the post states, "This initiative alone goes a long way to minimize the risk of ad misplacement. It provides those in the display advertising chain with a framework - clarifying rights and responsibilities within the increasingly complex process of ad trading." If I were a brand owner then I would be doing everything possible to ensure my ads don’t appear on the kind of placement that goes viral for all the wrong reasons.

But I don’t get how following the DTSG’s principles alone is going to solve the issue in actually identifying when this kind of thing happens and then controlling it before it becomes an issue and is spread across the world. Also – how do you optimize your ad spend if you don’t know where the ad has actually been placed?

There must be room for a 3rd party verification system somewhere here? Someone that is working on behalf of the advertisers to technically determine the impression authenticity.

I know we can do this at GfK but I’m off to talk to our techie people now, to make sure our URL identification capabilities are up to the demand that is likely to come our way following this IAB blog! :-)

For more information please contact Arno Hummerston at arno.hummerston@gfk.com, or follow him on Twiiter @ArnoHum.