Actor Al Pacino, as Viktor Taransky in the movie Simone, said, “Our ability to manufacture fraud now exceeds our ability to detect it”. This statement seems to encapsulate the challenge of combating ad fraud in today’s digital advertising landscape. As technological capabilities advance, so too are believed to be the tactics employed by fraudulent actors, who exploit vulnerabilities in digital systems. In this environment, ensuring the suitability of digital content surrounding ads has emerged as a critical concern for advertisers and industry stakeholders alike. According to a report published by Juniper Research, a market research and consulting service firm, in 2023, 22% of total costs incurred on digital advertising happened on account of fraudulent activities, which rounded up to $84 billion, with the figure expected to soar to $172 billion by 2028. In order to address issues around ad fraud, ad viewability, and brand risk, one such player in the market is Integral Ad Science (IAS), a digital advertising placement-based technology company. IAS posted a 31.2% increase in revenue from operations to Rs 52.36 crore in FY23 from Rs 39.85 crore in FY22, according to regulatory filings accessed by Tofler, a business research platform. The company reported a net profit of Rs 3.92 crore in FY23 from a net loss of Rs 1.02 crore in FY22. In a conversation with BrandWagon Online, Saurabh Khattar, country manager, IAS India, talks about how the company addresses ad fraud and brand safety concerns along with the strategic motivations behind its acquisitions. (Edited Excerpts)
What exactly is the science behind Integral’s ad verification technology? What strategies have you implemented to help brands avoid vulnerabilities, such as fraud, viewability, and brand risk, in the digital landscape?
IAS is a media quality company. We work on measuring inventory on the entire web, including different channels such as open web, social, and programmatic, among others. By removing the web inventory which isn’t working, we help advertisers measure and optimise their campaigns. Now, there is a negative value concept in the world of digital, which, unlike traditional mediums, brings challenges such as non-safe brand placements, fraudulent advertisements, obscurity of advertisements, along with lack of attention on viewers’ part. So, we intend to help advertisers go beyond this negative value towards quality impressions, through finding and spending on inventory which can result in a better return on investment (ROI) from their digital campaigns and spends. Moreover, we make sure that all the relevant data collected by advertisers and brands are equipped with regard to three parameters, which are brand safety, ad fraud, and viewability. Talking about specific strategies, we help brands report on these three parameters by helping them understand ad placements at domain and sub-domain levels where their placements can receive the ‘non-brand safe’ tag, along with blocking those placements in real-time. Similarly with ad fraud, we make brands aware of fraudulent placements and with viewability, we help them understand placements having high viewability and the ones having low. Currently in India, the benchmark for ad viewability is between 50-60%, depending on different placements. This means that almost 40-50% of advertisers’ spend goes to waste, with the audience not actually viewing those ads.
How does IAS differentiate itself from other martech companies, particularly in addressing ad fraud and brand safety concerns?
Our core product revolves around ad measurement, along with having other products which help ad optimisation and ad publishing. Within ad measurement, we have quality impressions or media quality measurement. There’s a new product that we recently launched, which is quality called attention. Now with quality attention, we help advertisers measure the areas from where they can get the highest attention, which is done using eye-tracking data. We entered into a partnership with Lumen Research, an attention technology company, which provides us with eye-tracking data to be put into our modelling and predictive algorithm, which helps define the attention score on various ad placements. We also have a Total Media Quality (TMQ) product, which pertains to media quality score. Today, I believe the emerging trend in the market is based on video and social content. We have seen growth in terms of content creation, especially with regard to user-generated content (UGC) being endorsed on platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat, among others. We have seen Gen-Zs spending almost 13.1 hours per week on just UGC. Along with users, video and social content is becoming important for advertisers and brands as well. Taking into account advertisers and brands, almost 60% of their digital media spending is seemingly getting directed towards video and social mediums. With total media quality, we analyse brand safety at a frame-by-frame basis for videos. It goes through almost 3,000 plus visual cues in a particular video, considering a sample video size of 12 minutes, and helps the advertiser understand if the video is safe or not through a brand safety rating. Furthermore, we measure the pages on the open web with our context control technology. Now, this technology makes sure that we are not just going through the keywords, but also conducting semantic analysis and sentiment analysis. Reportedly, there are over 90 different emotions on one page.
How does IAS help advertisers navigate the complexities of programmatic advertising and ensure that their ads reach the right audience in a brand-safe environment?
We have tied up with different programmatic players and channels such as DV360, Trade Desk, and Xandr, among others. We have a particular technology which, even before bidding on an impression is done, can help pre-filter safe ad placements, such as fraud-free placements, brand-safe placements, and high viewability placements. It’s a pre-filtration methodology which helps brands gain a better ROI on their campaigns. We have another solution called total visibility, which helps understand the financial complications of programmatic advertising. The solution also helps to understand the quality cost per mille (CPM), concerning the cost of buying inventory and different parts of buying inventory through supply-side platforms (SSPs) along with their quality score.
Till date, IAS has made seven acquisitions across sectors such as adtech, enterprise technology, and enterprise software, among others. What were the strategic motivations behind IAS’ acquisitions, and how have the acquisitions impacted the competitive landscape within the digital advertising industry, particularly in terms of technology and service offerings?
Our main goal is to ensure protection of advertisers at every step. I think the introduction of technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), is helping brands and advertisers but it’s also causing challenges in terms of unsafe ad placements. In order to fulfil our vision of protecting brands, and also helping them optimise their media budgets, we have been doing acquisitions. Recently, we acquired Publica, a connected TV (CTV) ad server, which is a solution that provides better yield to publishers along with providing CTV solutions such as ad surveying and contextual targeting. A few years back, we acquired ADmantX, a contextual analysis and data platform, which’s into natural language processing (NLP).
How does IAS plan to stay at the forefront of advancements in AI, machine learning, and other technologies that impact digital advertising effectiveness?
All of our products are AI-powered. I believe we measure almost 280 billion impressions per day and in order to get insights from these measured impressions, we have to use AI to help our advertisers understand that data. Like our attention product, which is a predictive model, is also powered by AI. Moreover, the main core of our upcoming products is based on AI. Our product offerings comprise an AI product which ensures that advertisers are protected from misinformation, by preventing them from spending on ad placements where misinformation is present. We also unveiled a new product offering called the Made for Advertising (MFA) AI-driven solution, which’s an AI-driven site detection and avoidance product, that improves transparency in advertiser campaign quality, identifies where spending is being allocated, and informs optimisations to minimise waste on MFA sites.
In recent developments, IAS received the Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation for CTV SIVT filtration. So, what specific methodologies did IAS employ to achieve MRC accreditation for CTV SIVT filtration, and how does this accreditation enhance the credibility and reliability of their services in combating ad fraud in CTV environments?
So, MRC is a non-profit industry body with certain guidelines for industry bodies, such as definitions of viewability, and fraud, among others, along with their auditors. This auditing process happens every year and takes around six months. As the information, which we give to advertisers has to be neutral and transparent, these accreditations help advertisers, agencies and publishers gain trust in us.