• by Tyler Loechner  @mp_tyler, April 24, 2013

While real-time bidding and automated exchanges have become entrenched in the industry, ad fraud has managed to wriggle its way in. Adweek reported that fraudulent inventory could be costing advertisers up to $400 million a year.

Included in fraudulent inventory is malicious content, either in the ad itself or on the landing page. As Magnetic's CEO James Green pointed out in RTB Insider on March 21, one of the tactics used to dupe publishers includes "viruses that run on computers and open websites on hidden windows so that a real person appears to be visiting web pages and seeing ads." 

Inneractive, a mobile supply-side platform (SSP), has announced a partnership with GeoEdge to help combat this problem and increase mobile ad quality. The partnership verifies whether or not malware or inappropriate content resides in ads or the landing pages. If a red flag appears, the publisher is alerted in real-time so that they can take action. 

Andreas Mac Mahon, CPO of Flexion, stated that Inneractive and GeoEdge found a "prohibited" ad in their inventory. "Following that, we opted out of the ad network and the matter was resolved in less than 10 minutes," he stated. It's not done with exact "real-time" speed, but removing malicious, crude, or otherwise undesired inventory in less than 10 minutes is a step up.

"One of the biggest challenges facing digital advertising, especially on mobile, is protecting against publishers' apps from being filled with undesirable content," stated Offer Yehudai, president and co-founder of Inneractive. "When it comes to ads supplied by the ad networks, their content can be undetectable." Yehudai also stated that through Inneractive's parternship with GeoEdge, they can now "provide full transparency into the ad's content and share it with publishers - a powerful tool to address a serious issue."