Should Media Owners, Big Brands, and Agencies Take Responsibility to Ensure Advertising is not Supporting Inappropriate Content?

From Ad buyers wanting more flexibility and stats for Facebook Watch ads to OTT innovation, here's what's new this week:See something we missed? Drop us a line.The state of ads.txt [Digiday]One trade-off for advertisers is that ads.txt is raising premium publishers’ programmatic ad rates. But because ads.txt helps mitigate domain spoofing, the higher ad prices should coincide with ads that perform better, McIntyre said. Ad buyers, publishers, vendors and industry groups continue to adopt ads.txt. Just last week, the Trustworthy Accountability Group announced that publishers will have to implement ads.txt in order to get TAG certification.Five Key Trends for Programmatic Advertising in 2018 [MarTechSeries]In its simplicity, ads.txt easily enabled publishers to publicly declare what sellers and re-sellers are authorized to sell their inventory. While adoption may have started slowly, the industry rapidly picked up the pace and it became a priority for the majority of publishers. While effective, there are still gaps that need to be filled.Ads.cert is starting to make more noise as the evolution of ads.txt as it will take a step further in promoting more transparency in the industry. In this new initiative, cryptography will be used to validate information between the seller and the buyer, thing ads.txt cannot provide at the moment. While it’s not a silver bullet that will solve all issues, it will leave less room for human error and for manipulation from fraudsters.Forget Viewability: Your Ads Aren’t Serving [Ad Exchanger]When it comes to creative compatibility, the programmatic exchanges are not taking their responsibility to advertisers seriously. Ultimately, we found that some exchanges don’t run simple compatibility checks on their publishers and trust them to self-report accurately in the face of an obvious counterincentive: higher CPMs.These 3 Issues Will Shape the Future of Demand-Side Platforms [Forbes]If a buyer is faced with using similar technology with comparable scale from multiple partners, they’re likely to go with the one who provides the most transparency to reduce potential risk. So as transparency demands become more stringent, DSPs who implement safeguards, provide whitelist/blacklist capabilities, activate data, know their inventory and are candid about fees, will be in the best position to benefit.Lotame Extends Smart TV Relationship With Inscape [B&C]aiTV: SmartTV Data: aiTV: SmartTV Data enables clients to target TV viewership audiences across digital. As an independent platform, Lotame is integrated with multiple DSPs, SSPs and audience-targeting tools. With these integrations, TV audience data, including viewers of specific programming and commercials and more, can be targeted online. This targeting is scaled through the Lotame Data Exchange.Programmatic Clean-Up on Brand Safety: It’s Just a Conscious Process [MarTechSeries]If programmatic is used to deliver the right ad to the right user, based on user data, with little regard for the content, then the problem is in the planning and targeting. With programmatic, it is largely the profile of the user accessing the content that governs which ad is served, not the content itself. In this case, the technology is used to efficiently find the user rather than to decipher what content they are viewing.Media owners, big brands, and agencies must take responsibility for fully understanding the digital context to ensure advertising is not supporting inappropriate content. Only by choosing advanced AI-based techniques that read the text as a human brain would and move away from primitive keyword filters, blacklists and whitelists will it be possible to reveal the true meaning of the content and determine if each impression is brand-safe before a programmatic bid is placed.SKIM THISAd buyers want more flexibility and stats for Facebook Watch ads [Digiday]fuboTV Connects With SpotX for Programmatic Advertising [Multichannel]Super Bowl Ads Can't Save TV [Fortune]How OTT Will Innovate In 2018[Forbes]GDPR: How are we interpreting the new data regulation? [The Drum]