Brand Safety Institute

The Brand Safety Institute is expanding its publisher transparency initiative to include new media quality assessments, including data compliance.

More competition between SSPs and ad servers should be a boon for publishers in the long term. But publishers will feel some growing pains if there is a sudden disruption in Google’s ad payouts or if their ad server fees increase.

The Brand Safety Institute released a new tool that lets publishers check whether their site domains have been flagged as MFA by third-party verification vendors.

Publishers expect the agencies will eliminate tech redundancies as they consolidate, which could compel pubs to shed redundant tech themselves. The merger could also entrench principal-based buying, which may not be a bad thing.

With an approved list of sites and contextually segmented content, publishers don’t risk getting caught up in automated keyword blocklists, which consistently demonetize the news.

Despite the backlash against MFA websites, there is still no industry standard to define MFA. So the 4A’s is hosting monthly meetings between buyers and sellers to nail down more explicit criteria for what constitutes MFA.

Seeking to bring more precision to the conversation, on Tuesday, AI content evaluation and generation company Seekr announced the launch of Align, a tool developed with Oxford Road that rates the “civility” of podcast discussions.

Publishers are fed up with brand safety and verification vendors using crawlers to scrape their sites for contextual signals, then using those signals to sell contextual ad products.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the ad tech industry took steps to freeze Russian-owned media companies out of the advertising ecosystem. But programmatic technology continues to be used by parties on both sides of the conflict as a platform to conduct psychological warfare.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Bull’s-Eye Targeting If you want to use Target’s first-party data, you don’t need to use Target’s DSP – just the SSP where it has its data loaded. Competitors (ahem, Amazon) force advertisers onto an owned DSP to activate segments such as “electronics purchasers,” for […]