Programmatic Advertising – Yet to conquer transparency in 2021
In Marketing the focus is always on what’s valuable to the customer. As we start the new decade with 2020, the Advertising Industry is thriving on the Digital Medium at an unprecedented rate moving past the traditional forms of advertising.
In this era of evolution the end goal still remains the same – ‘The Customer’. There are many reasons why Digital Advertising is the finer way to reach customers. For starters that’s where the user attention is; people are always on the internet. And the internet is filled with data around it’s users, on which modern Advertising flourishes.
We can’t deny the fact that the Digital medium with it’s Advertising Methods, Intelligent Platforms, Robust Targeting, Data Analytics and other uber features have made life easy for modern Marketers to show Ads to relevant users and get the best results.
Programmatic Advertising
An enhanced way of Digital Advertising known as ‘Programmatic Advertising’ allows you to do all this and much more on a vast scale, but has it’s cons. Each year Advertisers spend billions on Programmatic platforms to get more popular among their prospects. But it comes with an unworthy cost as Programmatic Advertising is also the most prone to Ad Fraud with inability to provide transparency to the Advertisers even today…!!
The bombastic growth of programmatic advertising had paved way for a lot of challenges. Even with the release of Authorize Digital Sellers aka Ads.txt in 2017 by IAB, most of the challenges still remain as only 60% of the top publishers have adopted it.
Ads.txt by Interactive Advertising Bureau
Ads.txt was created as an initiative to benefit both the sellers and buyers in the Digital Advertising Industry. It allows publishers to identify who can represent and sell their inventory. It’s a file that the publisher has to add to the site which verifies the ownership, and shows the approved ad sellers, to buy ad space on your site. It also creates a safe ecosystem for the buyers as their site will start receiving clean traffic or it’s a licensed retailer for inventories. However, few ill practices such as skipping full URL’s whilst they’re passed with the bid request. This doesn’t allow the advertisers to assess the quality of publisher inventory.
For a safer, fraud free advertising, Big Brands are keen to work with licensed Publishers only. Reason why all Publishers today should adopt Ads.txt to provide the so called ‘transparency’ that’s highly in demand among Advertisers: to avoid getting affected from the cons of Programmatic Advertising.
Higher Demand & Brand Safety are the two most important reason for Publishers to adopt Ads.txt
For finer performance and being in demand among top advertisers, is one of the reasons Publishers need to create a Fraud free ecosystem to offer brand safe contextual inventory that’s relevant for the advertiser. A high quality inventory is always an advertisers top priority when buying media, which is deeming to be a certain classification to rank the quality of a Publisher. So, for a Publisher it basically means they can put their foot forward with higher price points when they’re licensed.
Also lacking Transparency in 2021 is beyond worse and can get you black-listed for selling low quality inventories and triggering Brand Safety violations. To be honest, in this competitive era it’s just not worth it. But as an Advertiser, you always have to be careful as Fraud is still in Billions and more than 50% of Publishers are yet to be verified.
ClearTrust Brand Safety feature allows you to classify the content of the domain into various categories, as we know if a piece of content isn’t fitting for a particular advertiser it still can do well for many others. This feature allows advertisers to maximize at scale buying from inventories which are suitable to their needs.
