We recently spoke about a piece in Digiday that put its finger on marketers’ dread of the inappropriate screenshot capturing their brand up close against something awful. This has been preying on our mind, especially in the context of the rising trend of brands taking their programmatic activity in-house. 

“Marketers have let someone else spend their money for far too long,” said ad fraud researcher and consultant Augustine Fou in the Digiday piece. “They need to learn how to look at the data and do their own due diligence.”

Many brands are contemplating doing exactly this, which prompts two thoughts. One is that ad exchanges clearly need to give brands better protection and transparency if they don’t want those clients to take programmatic matters into their own hands.

With real-time buying comes the need for real-time verification of publishers. If exchanges do not have accurate and dynamic risk assessments about the publishers to which they serve ads, then both their advertisers and their own place in the supply chain will suffer.

And the second thought is directed to those brands that do turn to in-housing to take ownership of their ad supply chain, and it is this: the internet poses a constantly shifting array of risks to brands, and it takes great vigilance to monitor them all. Both go-it-alone brands and ad networks have a need for technology like ours, which uses AI to crawl the web night and day, maintaining dynamic lists of the web’s unsafe publishers.

If either of those descriptions applies to you, we’d love to talk to you about how we can provide the trust and transparency you are looking for. Get in touch!