The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has released the final version of its “Guidelines for the Conduct of Ad Verification,” in cooperation with the Media Rating Council (MRC). The advantage to advertisers and marketers is truth in numbers: IAB is promising that with a common set of standards, “companies engaged in the verification of interactive advertising campaigns can themselves be audited against a common, transparent standard.”
The participants in creating the guildelines include both buy- and sell-side heavyweights such as the New York Times, NBCUniversal, Turner Broadcasting, Yahoo!, Google, and verification services like AdXpose and Telemetry.
In an executive summary of the guidelines, IAB claimed as one of its goals to “reduce the chaos that has surrounded ad verification practice since its inception,” and to improve the trust between both buy- and sell-side industry organizations. “While ad verification in principle is valuable to the digital advertising industry, the lack of accountability created tension between the publishers and marketers.” said Steve Sullivan, Vice President, Advertising Technology for IAB. The Bureau “developed these guidelines to introduce a level of consistency into campaign assessments commensurate the industry's standards for impression measurement.”
The guidelines provide a detailed set of common methods and practices for verification of online advertising, useful to verification vendors and users of verification services (both buyers and sellers). They include mobile, e-mail or lead generation campaigns of all types and address a wide range of topics, including:
- Ad-serving prevention (“ad blocking”) carries larger implications to the buyer and/or seller because the intended ad serving transaction is interrupted. The guidelines recommend that ad blocking may be used in instances where the relevant domain or page-level URL is already on a blocking list, for competitive separation and fraud prevention. Ad blocking should only be built into ad serving systems, so decisions are made pre-serve.
- Nested iFrames are often recognized as legitimate technology, but because of browser operational/security considerations, there is limited visibility into the legitimacy of iFrames filled with content from outside the parent domain. For that reason, the guidelines recommend ad verification vendors have procedures to classify and report whether advertising served into iFrames from other domains has been appropriately executed. In addition, the general nature of the verification tools used to view iFrame content should be disclosed. Moreover, it is recommended that the industry minimize the use of nested iFrames.
- Geo-targeting IP-based processes can vary in quality based on the geo-targeting vendor used. The guidelines recommend geo-targeting vendors subject their processes to independent auditing and that natural differences in geo targeting accuracy between vendors be taken into account.
“Consistent and transparent conduct of ad verification is vital for deepening confidence in the industry and driving the advancement of digital advertising,” said George Ivie, Executive Director and CEO of the MRC. “We believe the issuance of these guidelines represent a major step toward achieving these goals.”
IAB has made the guidelines available on its website.
