Malvertising can easily propagate through the ad tech ecosystem through ads created to represent legitimate brands tricking users into interacting with a creative. Recent research from Confiant’s Malvertising & Ad Quality study showed 1 in every 156 impressions was dangerous or highly disruptive to the user. Serving a bad ad can result in not only initial revenue loss, but future revenue loss through greater adoption of ad blockers.

Ultimately, we know that addressing advertising transparency concerns is critical for sellers in order to protect their audiences, engagement rates, and relationships with advertisers. Transparency has always been at the core of our business and we are proud to announce LiquidM as the first DSP globally to adopt the new IAB buyers.json standard, which extends the same transparency efforts that exist on the sell-side to the buy-side.

“We deeply believes in making the entire digital advertising industry a safer and more transparent ecosystem to interact in. LiquidM being the first DSP globally to adopt the buyers.json standard is just one of many steps we have taken towards that vision and it also serves as our message to the industry to rally together to no longer allow demand-side bad actors to operate anonymously,” said JC Peube, Smart’s SVP of Analytics and Quality.

Mirroring Sell-Side Transparency

Lack of transparency into buyer identity is one of the key challenges publishers and SSPs have in order to eliminate bad entities across the chain at once. To help overcome this, the IAB recently introduced two new ad tech standards: buyers.json and DemandChain Object. Similar to the standards already in place on the sell-side, they aim to provide transparency for buy-side entities.

“Buyers.json and DemandChain Object are the industry’s best opportunity to bring transparency to the buy-side and root out the abuses that have driven so many users to adopt ad blockers. I applaud Smart’s leadership in being the first DSP to adopt buyers.json and hope this will serve as a call-to-action for publishers to demand the wide adoption of these standards,” said John Murphy, Chief Strategy Officer, Confiant.

With buyers.json, DSPs can declare the advertisers they represent which allows them to take action to protect themselves, their supply partners, publishers, and users from problematic buyers. DemandChain Object, which is meant to be used in conjunction with buyers.json, requires cooperation from others in the ecosystem. It ultimately helps map all entities involved in the direct flow of payment for an impression and the creative running within it.

How Buyers.json Works

buyers.json

Together, these new standards help publishers and SSPs more easily trace the sources of malvertising attacks and identify problematic buyers across multiple demand sources. And they will allow publishers to confidently monetize and monitor the spend on their inventory while providing audiences a positive user experience.

We are committed to protecting publishers and users from malvertising. As the industry begins to adopt these new standards, we look forward to working with other ad tech players to build a more transparent and ethical advertising ecosystem that benefits publishers, advertisers, users and all the players in between.

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