• by Laurie Sullivan , May 6, 2019

Media.net has donated code to extend the IAB Tech Lab’s efforts to increase transparency and security in the technology advertising supply chain. 

“Media.net built these tools for our own use, but after hearing from others that resource constraints have been a part of the lag in adoption, we asked the IAB Tech Lab how we can help,” wrote Doug Lauretano, SVP and GM at Media.net, in an email to Digital News Daily.

“The changes to OpenRTB and ads.cert will provide enormous help to advertisers that want to know what they are buying and drive performance from dollars spent,” Lauretano wrote. “The initiatives that these tools help to push forward are core to cleaning up the programmatic ecosystem and removing fraud, waste and doubt.”  

The donation was announced Monday at the IAB Tech Lab Innovation Day: Transparency and a Secure Programmatic Supply Chain.  

The adoption of the OpenRTB 3.0 protocol, along with the subsequent rollout of ads.cert, aims to help the industry make progress toward a safer and transparent supply chain. Donating the code for the OpenRTB convertor and ads.cert verification tool supports the IAB Tech Lab initiative.

The company says more than 400 objects were mapped between the OpenRTB 2.x protocol and 3.0, ensuring that partners can take advantage of the 3.0 protocol benefits. It also enables companies to achieve ads.cert Digital Signature Verification, with in-memory caching for minimizing latency and sampling capabilities to reduce costs.

Media.net’s core technology is a contextual engine that can analyze content and understand the intent of the user viewing the content. “One of Media.net's most successful partnerships has been working with Yahoo and Microsoft to bring the performance budgets of search advertising into display formats by mapping to that contextual intent,” Lauretano wrote.