Mpire Corp.’s AdXpose, an ad verification technology and media company, announced that its verification technology has been certified by the popular advertiser ad serving platform, DART, which is owned by Google. Read more on MediaPost.
President and CRO of AdXpose, Kirby Winfield, discussed the DART certification and what it means.
AdExchanger.com: Can you discuss the certification process? What did Google look at to make sure that it was something appropriate for their ad server and
certifiable?
KW: The process was definitely a mutual product and development effort. We started working with DoubleClick on the technology evaluation in Q4 2009. The key was the actual client demand from our agency partners like Mediacom for a turn-key implementation process – with holding company agencies asking ad servers for AdXpose, it became a much easier conversation to get the access and resources needed to develop straight to the servers’ platforms. With DoubleClick, our team evaluated a number of different options and decided that the best and most appropriate target for integration was into DART (DFA and DFP) Creative Templates, which allow the client to apply the AdXpose instrumentation via a drop-down list selection rather than directly editing or altering direct creative or 3rd party tags. The implementation was thoroughly tested in our own DART account, then tested directly by several mutual (DART/AdXpose) clients. Lastly, DART certification required that we prove that (a) all ad delivery requirements and browser-specific treatments were upheld, (b) that our JavaScript in no way impacted ad delivery time, (c) was not implemented as a wrapper tag or server-side redirect, and (b) was compliant with the guidelines specified in the template documentation. We met all criteria in the first evaluation and were quickly certified.
How is pricing affected by this integration into DART’s ad server?
There is no addition cost to a client’s existing ad server or AdXpose pricing. If anything, there is an operational cost savings at work here, because our clients’ ad ops teams are able to arm their campaigns – often hundreds of individual creatives – with AdXpose via a simple drop-down command right within their existing ad server workflow. Compare this to the pixel-and-crawl-based methodology of some other solutions, and it’s clear that the server-side integration is at the very least a value-add.
Should publishers be concerned by AdXpose’s ad verification product? Is it giving transparency that goes beyond the setting a publisher may be enable through DFP – such as masking their URL to prevent channel conflict?
Our philosophy is simple: Our clients own the data they generate using our services. Publishers are as free as any party in the ecosystem to benefit from and own AdXpose data. In fact, we specifically work with supply side players such as video and display ad networks and optimizers, who use our engagement data for yield and network optimization, among other things, and who have complete control of what data is accessible and by whom. We don’t want to force transparency on any given publisher, and DFP masking settings are not impacted by this implementation in any way.
By John Ebbert
