Industry Insights

2019: A Year in Review – Supply Transparency (Part 1 of 3)

With 3 days till we usher in 2020, let us take a look at the top 3 events of the year that have had a huge impact in the ad tech space. In no particular order…

Ad Fraud has been a common topic of discussion and news coverage since the early days of digital advertising. Much of which was due to the complex supply chain that allowed fraudsters multiple avenues to hide in plain sight.

In 2017, the IAB Tech Lab released ads.txt; a mechanism meant to combat a common type of ad fraud – domain spoofing. Publishers are able to declare the parties authorised to sell their inventory. While it isn’t perfect, it definitely is a step in the right direction for the whole industry as everyone started realising the importance of supply transparency – a phase I like to refer to as Supply Transparency 1.0.

Supply Transparency 2.0

Fast forward to 2019, we enter Supply Transparency 2.0 as additional mechanisms are developed and released by the IAB Tech Lab to further mitigate ad fraud and provide greater transparency into the supply ecosystem; app-ads.txt in March 2019 and sellers.json/SupplyChain in July 2019.

app-ads.txt

App-ads.txt functions the same as ads.txt except that it applies to app instead of web; not an exciting update but still much needed given how big mobile app usage has become. Just to put into perspective the kind of impact app-ads.txt will have – an eMarketer report back in 2017 estimated that an average US adult will spend close to 90% of his/her mobile usage in app. That is huge given the fact that desktop usage is on the decline.

sellers.json/SupplyChain

sellers.json/SupplyChain on the other hand is much cooler and more sophisticated (if you’re a geek)! At its simplest form, SupplyChain provides buyers the ability to have full view of the supply path; where the impression originated from and how many parties “interacted” with the impression before it reaches the buyer. This is made possible via information declared on ads.txt/app-ads.txt and sellers.json with the latter being a ledger of all sellers within the exchange/SSP. sellers.json is a similar concept to ads.txt/app-ads.txt except that it is managed by the exchange/SSP while ads.txt/app-ads.txt is managed by the publisher.


That is it for Supply Transparency 2.0! Are we looking at Zero Ad Fraud from now on? Definitely not (plus it is near impossible to have zero fraud) however we are making it tougher for ad fraud to take place in the supply ecosystem. 2019 sure has some cool updates which makes 2020 an exciting year to look forward to in the Supply Path Optimisation (SPO) space.

I will be posting some thoughts and my take on the initiatives briefly mentioned above and more. Stay tuned!

Attribution
Photo by fotogestoeber on Adobe Stock

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