• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 28, 2009

 

An innovative technology hit the market Wednesday that can police where rich media and display advertisements are bought through an ad network run. Veracity, a software as a service (SaaS) application from Adometry, focuses on increasing the efficiencies where ads are placed.

Adometry's ad verification technology aims to compete with offerings from Double Verify and Mpire, as well as analytics capabilities from Atlas. Today the service operates as a stand-alone application, but Adometry CEO Jim Ewel, a twelve-year veteran of Microsoft and former CEO and chairman of GoAhead Software, admits the technology would integrate nicely into a dashboard supported by analytics companies like Omniture.

The service monitors where ads run to ensure the ads are compliant. "Impressions can fall into one of three buckets: harmful to the brand, wasted through laziness, or working but not fully optimized," Ewel says. "We try to work on improving all three."

Compliancy means ads don't run on non-compliant and inappropriate sites. For example, when monitoring a media buy for a financial services company during the test phase of the application, Adometry found that about 20% of the "business contextual placement" impressions ended up on game sites for kids.

When asked how something like that happens, Ewel says ad networks are not as careful as they need to be. "We saw this continuously across major ad networks and some publishers," he says.

Sometimes the ad networks are in violation of contracts. Other times they are in violation of common sense. Ad networks and publishers also could violate the contract by inserting multiple impressions on a page or placing the ad in the wrong location, such as below the fold.

During the test phase of Veracity involving several advertisers, publishers, ad networks and ad agencies, Adometry on average identified savings between 20% and 25% per campaign for clients. Copacino + Fujikado participated in the test run. Ewel says the company saved about $3,000 in one ad buy at one ad network. Another unnamed client testing the service spent more than $110,000 in a media buy and saved nearly $27,000.

After clients provide a list of categories for which ad networks should run placements, Adometry becomes the eyes of the Internet on behalf of the client. The results are available in near real-time, a few seconds to a few minutes after the ad starts running, Ewel says.

Ewel had been working with Adometry for nearly three months before stepping in as CEO, and managed to pony up some cash, along with others, to become an angel investor.