• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, September 22, 2010

AOL's Advertising.com, Audience Science, and Burst are now among the best-performing ad technology companies -- with the least number of non-compliant incidences in campaigns -- according to new research from digital media-verification company DoubleVerify.

For the study, DoubleVerify analyzed hundreds of advertisers, thousands of verified campaigns, and more than 150 billion ad impressions between January and June of this year.

To identify the top performers in the industry, DoubleVerify evaluated networks based on benchmarks of non-compliance, including: instances of ads served out of inclusion lists, in exclusion lists, alongside inappropriate content and ads served to international audiences.

Other top-performing ad technology companies included Fox Audience Network, interclick, Microsoft Media Network, Tribal Fusion and ValueClick Media.

"Our data shows that improvements are being made across the board to increase brand safety and trust," said an optimistic Oren Netzer, CEO of DoubleVerify. "Verified campaigns especially showed vast improvement in non-compliance."

"Nevertheless," added Netzer, "there's still work to be done and we hope this data will provide benchmarks for advertising vendors to guide them toward."

Additional data taken into consideration when analyzing overall non-compliance of the online advertising industry included: instances when multiple ads from the same advertiser were served, when ads were served alongside a competitor and when ads were served below the fold.

According to the report, the most compliant advertising networks had an average of 2% incidents of non-compliance over the first six months of 2010.

By comparison, the ten networks that struggled most saw an average of 37% incidents of non-compliance.

In addition, the most compliant platforms -- DSPs, Ad Exchanges and Trading Desks -- showed an average of 6% incidents of non-compliance, outperforming the lower tier of players by almost five times.

The standard deviation for the top-performing ad networks was 17% across campaigns, while the standard deviation for the lowest-performing ad networks was 28%.