• by Sven Lubek , December 24, 2018

Brand safety is one of the key concerns for more than 59% of programmatic advertisers today, eMarketer reports, due to issues of recurring fraud and ad network bad practices, such as displaying ads next to offensive content that greatly misaligns with a brand’s messaging.

Marketers can take measured steps to ensure that their advertisement investments are more secure, including these tips:

1) Invest in private marketplaces. Leverage direct relationships with publishers by running digital display ads through private marketplaces (PMP) and programmatic direct deals. From our experience, by using this approach for media buying, we can know exactly who we are purchasing from and where our ads will be placed, offering peace of mind as well as good performance.

2) Use machine learning to implement audience targeting. This will enable the creation of audiences that look just like your customers. You can then safely expand the audience targeting for your campaigns and proactively monitor to ensure you achieve exceptional user quality and engagement. By using machine learning you target the right demographics, geographical locations and post-install behavior, resulting in higher user lifetime value

3) Request Ads.txt. Work with publishers that use Ads.txt on their web servers and list all of the companies that are authorized to sell their inventory. Vice versa, it's also beneficial when programmatic platforms integrate these files to confirm which publishers’ inventory they are authorized to sell. This allows buyers to check the validity of the inventory they purchase.

4) Create whitelists. An alternative to blacklisting is to whitelist specific sites. This way, you can find sites that are safe to run ads on and compile a list of options that you can then use when preparing a media buy. There are exchanges that have an intense inventory approval process, which can support the creation of whitelists.

5) Prioritize fraud technology. IMany different types of ad fraud practices have emerged over the years, including pixel stuffing, ad-stacking, ghost sites and masked URLs. Brands are impacted when programmatic ads are placed on pages with false traffic generated through automated programs.

Invest in resources that provide fraud-mitigating technology, such as through machine learning software for identifying malicious traffic in order to act quickly in response. By using machine learning anti-fraud technology, you can monitor and analyze all incoming traffic data to detect recurring patterns and anomalies in real time. This helps block fraudulent traffic and automatically optimizes toward converting users with good post-install KPIs.