Should marketers ask harder questions of their brand safety and ad verification partners?

Mike Tasik, group media director of full-service agency Crispin, said his clients had begun raising questions more frequently “within the past couple of years,” beginning with the 2020 election, and increasing ahead of this year’s poll. 

For years, question marks have loomed over these companies, but marketers largely stayed silent. The risks seemed too daunting, and the potential benefits too hazy. Now, however, the tide is turning.

The Department of Justice’s (DoJ) inquiries into the workings of Doubleverify and Integral Ad Science signal just how widespread these concerns have become in the industry.

Officials from the DoJ, according to Marketing Brew, spent time last month asking ad executives about the workings of Doubleverify and Integral Ad Science. The informal inquiries signal just how widespread these concerns have become in the industry. 

The DoJ hasn’t publicly said why it’s interested in the work of DoubleVerify or IAS, and its press team didn’t respond to a request for comment. But given the conversations were “spurred,” by an August report from Adalytics that alleged recruitment ads for the U.S. Navy and National Guard were running on sanctioned Russian and Iranian websites, it’s likely that the DoJ’s lines of questioning were focused on the US government’s own $1.8 billion annual ad spend.

The DoJ’s queries were “hard to ignore,” Tasik said in an email.

Media lawyer Peter Jackson, a counsel at law firm Greenberg Glusker, told Digiday: “From the reporting, the inquiry seems to stem from the government’s own interest in ensuring its ads don’t run against objectionable content, as opposed to a broader inquiry into these services as a whole.”

A spokesperson for DoubleVerify confirmed that the firm had not been approached by the DoJ. “We maintain close, trusted and transparent relationships with our customers on brand safety and suitability,“ they said in an email. IAS did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.

Nonetheless, it’s clear that some of these relationships – and others across the industry – are undergoing a reassessment. 

“Clients are asking better questions around brand safety as it relates to the vendors we use, what specific levers they’re pulling and how it fits into the overall media strategy,” said Tasik. He noted that marketers are often concerned with identifying benchmarks for viewability and dwell times on ads.

Examples of questions, according to Tim Haarmann, managing director, Media by Mother, included: “Are we using all the right tools? Are we using the tools to the best of their capabilities? Are we putting a human perspective on this?”

Jonathan D’Souza–Rauto, biddable product lead at Kepler, added that clients often ask whether vendors’ tech correctly flagged unsuitable, unsafe or fraudulent environments, and how they could avoid such issues without demonetizing news publishers that report on wars or crime. 

What they do with these answers remains to be seen. Either way, the chances of them turning their backs on these ad verification tools is slim. Sure, they may be a bit blunt and imperfect, but they serve a precautionary purpose, and marketers haven’t faced any penalties for erring on the side of caution. 

One brand marketer, who exchanged anonymity for candor, likened the use of third party vendors to “very expensive insurance.”

Unfortunately, that insurance hasn’t exactly offered peace of mind. According to Kepler’s D’Souza–Rauto, questions from “the more switched on brands” on how third-party tools actually work, whether their practices penalize news publishing and on viewability metrics are “definitely in conversation more now.”

This scrutiny has prompted marketers to adopt more sophisticated approaches to complement their existing ad verification provider, rather than replace them entirely. Think of it as an unbundling of ad verification. 

According to performance marketing execs, that wouldn’t mean discarding third-party tools necessarily, but rather investing in the time required to better understand and interrogate them.

For Jay Friedman, CEO of Goodway Group, this would mean prioritizing inclusion lists over exclusion lists. According to Friedman, this would reduce concerns about over-active filters. 

“That, in and of itself, allays a dramatic amount of [the] concerns,” he added. An inclusion-led approach to contextual advertising would support news publishers and journalism on the web, rather than using too-broad keyword blocklists that habitually wall off reporting on conflict and crime despite a lack of evidence that brands suffer from advertising against such content.

Pre-bid brand safety checks, industry experts said, are considered a more airtight means of ensuring an ad isn’t going to run somewhere it shouldn’t, because they flag unsuitable environments before a bid’s been made.

“From a pre-bid solution, IAS and DV are useful,” said the brand marketer. “You can identify inventory before we bid on it, whether it meets brand safety requirements, verification, fraud, viewability. Everything else is money wasted.”

For its part, DoubleVerify argues in favor of clients checking its workings. “We encourage advertisers to review our data independently to continually assess and enhance performance, recognizing that accountability strengthens results,” the firm’s spokesperson told Digiday.

Most of the above adjustments would require more time spent thinking about verification and brand safety by either marketers or their agencies – time and billable hours that not every client can spare. “I think a lot of companies think that holding them accountable is more trouble than it’s worth,” said Friedman.

At the end of the day, advertisers’ brand safety concerns pre-date the DoJ’s interest – and are larger than their reliance on just two companies. Perhaps the greater issue is the industry’s eagerness to embrace a quick-fix solution to a long-standing problem.

“We have certain clients that just believe you tick a box and it protects you, which I completely disagree with,” D’Souza-Rauto said. “Just because it’s there doesn’t mean it’s working. You still need a human approach to analyze and to do other things that the technology isn’t doing.”

— Kristina Monllos contributed to this report.