Identity

Last month AdExchanger reported on plans by AppNexus to roll out a “Certified Supply” stamp of approval for demonstrably valid impressions, and thereby cut off the flow of spend to impressions that are fraudulent, nonviewable or otherwise undesirable. The certified program came amid growing industry concerns about the persistence of fraud in the AppNexus supply. […]

Here’s a potential new acronym for you: MOOH – that’s to say, mobile out-of-home. Digital OOH programmatic player Vistar Media launched an extension of its cross-screen offering Wednesday via a partnership with AirSage, a little-known Atlanta-based company that collects data on consumer location and population movement. AirSage captures and analyzes in the neighborhood of 15 […]

In the two years since GPS solutions provider Telenav acquired hyperlocal ad platform Thinknear, there’s been minimal technology integration between the two companies. But that’s all part of the strategic plan, Telenav vet Loren Hillberg told AdExchanger. Hillberg, who most recently served as VP and general counsel at Telenav, a public company, announced Tuesday that […]

This is the 11th in a series of interviews with vendors combating the problem of ad fraud. Other companies participating in this series include  Sizmek. Read previous interviews with comScore, DoubleVerify, Dstillery, Forensiq, Integral Ad Science, PubChecker, Telemetry,Videology, White Ops and RTB Asia. The meta-problem with ad fraud, according to Moat CEO Jonah Goodhart, is that it’s a tremendous […]

Verizon bills itself as a triple threat. It’s got mobile, it’s got television, it’s got broadband. And those three channels form the foundation for a deterministic data cocktail that Precision Market Insights (PMI) – Verizon’s addressable advertising division – is tapping to power Precision ID, the carrier’s answer to the ever-elusive mobile cookie. When Verizon […]

No one’s going to say that walled gardens don’t have their perks. Just look at Facebook and the new and improved Atlas. Facebook’s long-awaited announcement of a cross-device user ID solution, made Monday as part of Advertising Week in New York City, invites advertisers into a putative Eden that gives them access to what could […]

Ad-serving and verification company Telemetry isn’t in favor of automating the ad fraud detection process. The problem, said Geo Carncross, the company’s global VP of engineering, is that detection sensors can be fooled into thinking fraudulent impressions are real and, consequently, advertisers will start optimizing for fraud instead of for real ad performance. Telemetry’s fraud […]

How bad a problem is online ad fraud, and how should the buy and sell sides divvy the responsibility to combat it? This question formed the crux of the panel “New Methods For Defeating Fraud In The Programmatic Era,” moderated by WPP’s Team Detroit chief digital officer, Kurt Unkel, at Wednesday’s Programmatic I/O conference in New […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Receive The Sell Sider in your inbox twice a week by signing up for the email here, and selecting The Publisher Newsletter.  Today’s column is written by Alex Linde, senior vice president of monetization at The Weather Company. Mobile can sometimes […]

This is the fourth in a series of interviews with vendors combating the problem of ad fraud. Other companies participating in this series include White Ops, DoubleVerify, Moat,Telemetry, Asia RTB and Integral Ad Science. Read previous interviews with Forensiq, Integral Ad Science and Videology.  To combat ad fraud, many in the industry have been looking to technology that detects […]

AOL is both a technology company and a publisher, a fact that works in Gravity’s favor. Acquired by AOL in January, Gravity’s 45-person team is a part of AOL’s 4,800-strong workforce and its content personalization engine now powers internal links to AOL’s content repository, which sees 4,000 to 5,000 new articles every day. Gravity’s engine […]

This is the second in a series of interviews with vendors combating the problem of ad fraud. Other companies participating in this series include White Ops, DoubleVerify, Forensiq, Moat, PubChecker and Telemetry. Read last week’s interview with Videology. When it comes to detecting and preventing ad fraud, Integral Ad Science is the middleman. That is, […]

Digital media measurement company comScore revealed a deal Monday to acquire MdotLabs, a cyber-security startup that uses statistics and machine-learning to fight online fraud. Non-human traffic, click-farms and other “invalid activity” represent a $14 billion assault on the advertising industry and have spurred deals in online fraud detection, most notably Google’s acqui-hire of Spider.io earlier this […]

Cookies are notoriously useless on mobile, but they’re the bread and butter of the Internet. If you go to diapers.com and then hit up Buy Buy Baby’s site, it’s likely you have a new baby in the house. If you use your phone in an airport in Miami and then check in to a restaurant […]

This is the first in a series of interviews with vendors combating the problem of ad fraud. Other companies participating in this series include White Ops, DoubleVerify, Forensiq, Moat, PubChecker, Telemetry and Integral Ad Science. Videology might not be specialists in ad fraud like White Ops or Integral Ad Science, but preventing and detecting it […]

Are you a technology or retail company? If so, you’ve probably got a bigger problem with ad fraud than your CPG or telco counterparts, at least according to Integral Ad Science’s Q2 2014 Industry Report, which includes information from the ad tech companies, exchanges and agencies it works with. So why are verticals like technology […]

There’s a digital ad fraud outbreak – one that gobbles up roughly $14 billion in advertising spend and between 25 and 50% of ad spend per campaign. White Ops CEO and cofounder Michael Tiffany likens the landscape to a cholera outbreak. Bots cause their devastation in a certain corner of the web and move on. White […]

Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley wants users to know that the company has moved away from the check-in, its former flagship service. The location-based platform’s future now lies in technology that enables users to do personalized local searches and find their friends on any device. “Our goal is to reinvent local search and local discovery,” said […]

Location-based ad network Thinknear (a division of Telenav) on Monday unveiled its Location Score to help advertisers gauge the accuracy of location data. The Location Score is a 100-point scale (100 being most accurate) that helps marketers understand the quality of location data used in their campaigns. The technology uses Thinknear’s platform to quantify the […]

Demand for location-based ad inventory is rising and PubMatic, the supply-side platform (SSP) provider, is one of the latest companies to boost its location-enabled inventory. PubMatic teamed up with location-based ad network xAd to create a programmatic marketplace of location-verified inventory, the companies said Friday. “Location is critical from a mobile standpoint,” said Bob Walczak, […]

Rocket Fuel intends to release a free anti-fraud product in June called Bot Or Not – available to advertisers regardless of whether they’re clients. (Update 5/27: The company has settled on the name Botfinder.) CTO Mark Torrance announced the product’s existence at the Rocket Fuel Summit in New York City on Tuesday and shined a little light into […]

If the message in ad tech company Conversant’s year-end quarterly was one of renewal following a rough 2013, its Q1 was about stability and sustainability as the company beat the guidance it provided in its Q4 2013 call. This was largely due to improvements in the company’s display business as well as its work in […]

There are two general methods for targeting consumers as they flit across desktops and devices: match various online log-ins and/or make educated guesses about an identity based on aggregated device characteristics. Many data-focused ad tech companies can do the former; fewer can do the latter as well. MediaMath, through its acquisition Thursday of French cross-device […]

Facebook’s unveiling last week of a mobile feature called Nearby Friends, through which it might enable location-targeted ads, places the company in a highly competitive segment of tech vendors offering similar products. The company that will develop the best location-targeted ad product, however, is the one that will couple it with the most relevant consumer […]

Most know Adobe for the company’s Creative and Marketing Cloud offerings, but it’s the company’s end-to-end, “TV Everywhere” platform Adobe Primetime that steals the show with broadcasters and cable operators like NBC Sports and Time Warner Cable. The year-old platform encompasses technology Adobe acquired when it bought video ads platform Auditude in 2011, as well […]

Connecting consumers across devices is on every advertiser’s mind these days, and vendors are ramping up to accommodate. Add Sizmek to that list. The ad tech company plans to release during the second week of May Device Intelligence, an analytics feature designed to enable targeting and measurement of mobile ads. The analytics component is made […]

Digital ad fraud has lately gained mainstream awareness, and many marketers at leading brands now realize the threat that fraud poses to their ability to track online advertising. A Wall Street Journal piece last week chronicled concerns at organizations like L’Oreal, General Motors and Verizon Communications. Fortunately for marketers, as the bad guys are shifting their […]

Advertising intelligence provider Integral Ad Science has acquired Simplytics, a UK-based mobile ad server and analytics platform. The deal brings mobile verification capabilities for in-app and mobile Web campaigns to Integral’s existing verification services for video and display ads. “We’re very excited because Simplytics is complementary to what we do and once we add our fraud […]

Pushing hyperlocal mobile advertisements is becoming increasingly viable for businesses as tech giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter, as well as startups, enter the space. One such hyperlocal ad startup is Thinknear, which was acquired by GPS solutions provider Telenav for $22.5 million last year. AdExchanger spoke with Thinknear CEO Eli Portnoy about the evolution […]

The belief that cookies don’t work on handhelds or tablets, requiring an alternative tracking mechanism, oversimplifies the complex problem of mobile tracking. While advertisers cannot use third-party cookies to track mobile users the same way they would a desktop user, cookies can indeed be applied to an extent in a mobile environment. And while many […]