• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, Yesterday

Advertising safety service DoubleVerify is suing controversial advertising analytics firm Adalytics for publishing research studies that it says falsely asserted that DoubleVerify's services are ineffective in filtering ad fraud, including invalid traffic and robotic agents.

The lawsuit, which does not specify damages, follows the release of a comprehensive analysis by the Media Rating Council (MRC) asserting that Adalytics research failed to understand and factor for the way the ad industry actually filters invalid traffic.

While Adalytics utilizes a method of observational research detecting invalid traffic during the "pre-bid" stage, the ad industry's standard used by the MRC and most brand safety filtration firms recommends doing it on the back-end, which means advertisers don't actually pay for invalid traffic.

"Adalytics, for its part, is an unaccredited and unaudited 'ad-tech' vendor. It is operated and staffed by a very limited set of personnel and sells an ad transparency service that competes with DoubleVerify," the suit reads, adding: "In practice, Adalytics’ main endeavors include periodically publishing articles on its website for marketing purposes. Adalytics presents these articles as 'research' documents, but they are instead hit pieces full of inflammatory and baseless allegations against companies like DoubleVerify. Adalytics undertakes 'research' for its blog posts and articles by cherry-picking an exceedingly small number of impressions from data it scrapes from a small sample of bot logs. This technique is prone to error, bias, and data manipulation. Adalytics spins its 'analysis' of an anecdotal number of impressions into a narrative targeting advertising industry participants and uses its blog posts and articles to promote its own platform to advertisers, including customers and prospective customers of DoubleVerify. This malicious playbook, which Adalytics has now replicated on numerous occasions, is aimed at generating shock-based publicity for its own 'platform' through defamation of ad industry participants."

The suit demands a jury trial.