• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 15, 2021

Stitching together technology to identify and stop ad fraud remains a challenge. 

Pixalate has created technology that analyzes the path that programmatic impressions take from the start of each transaction, all the way to its final sale. The technology focuses on ad-fraud risk management.

The technology, which is aimed at reducing the risk of ad fraud, determines where it increased the most and identifies at what point fraud potentially entered the supply path to eliminate higher-risk sources in the future.

It is based on an analysis of the IAB Tech Lab's SupplyChain Object and sellers.json files, with a major goal of gaining adoption for these standards.

IAB Tech Lab introduced these standards two to three years ago, says Amit Shetty, vice president of product management at Pixalate, which focuses on protection, privacy, and compliance analytics platform for connected TV (CTV) and mobile advertising.

The technology -- an extension of Pixalate’s analytics dashboard -- adds the ability to identify ad-fraud risk when analyzing the supply path.

The advertising industry needs to approach viewability with a collaborative way of thinking to follow the path through the supply chain.

It helps to determine who and what touched each impression, how many resellers were involved, where the weak links are in the supply path, and much more.

Shetty joined Pixalate after serving as a vice president at the IAB Tech Lab.

When an impression transfers from the publisher to the SSP or the exchange -- which the industry calls a hop -- ad fraud increases by 75%. The core of the new technology is to give advertisers another way to find and eliminate ad fraud and arbitrage risk in programmatic.

The driver for a lot of this complexity, programmatic, enables advertising to "find different paths to locate and reach the audiences that you might not have planned for," says Amit Shetty, vice president of product management at Pixalate, which focuses on protection, privacy, and compliance analytics platform for connected TV (CTV) and mobile advertising. “While it has advantages, one challenge may be not knowing much about the companies involved in the transition, which may amount to hundreds.”

Pixalate’s technology, which aims to verify quality in the supply path, identifies the different companies involved in the transition.

It begins when the publisher sends a bid request to a supply-side platform, and the SSP sends it to an exchange, and possibly to a second exchange before it goes to a demand-side platform.