• by Felicia Greiff , March 17, 2016

Programmatic video platform Altitude Digital announced Thursday that it's partnering with DoubleVerify to combat ad fraud.

Ad fraud -- which the Association of National Advertisers and WhiteOps projected will cost advertisers $7.2 billion in 2016 as a result of fraudulent impressions -- is blamed for much of the industry's trust issues around transparency. An ANA and Forrester study earlier this year found almost 70% of respondents cited higher bot fraud in programmatic buys as a concern, and some said lack of inventory and data transparency among other issues posed challenges to the overall programmatic experience. 

That's where third-party verification partners like DoubleVerify come in.

With the partnership, DoubleVerify will pre-screen video impressions before they reach an auction, filtering out violations such as non-human bot fraud, masked URLs, hidden ads and impression laundering. Altitude Digital's other anti-fraud partners include Moat, Sizmek's Peer39 and Integral Ad Science, which the company partnered with in May 2015.

A lot of publishers don’t have a handle on how much non-human traffic is in their inventory, said Altitude's CTO, Manny Puentes, adding that there’s always some form of non-human traffic across publications. So the partnership with DoubleVerify will help publishers understand the DNA of their inventory, Puentes said, and advertisers buying on Altitude's platform will be protected from seeing fraudulent traffic.