Today’s digital world is rapidly advancing and almost becoming too innovative for the major publishers/portals to handle.  Seems weird writing that since these are the companies that used to be the bulls of the industry when it came to development and innovation.  But somehow, these companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN  and the larger independent publishers are becoming less eager to work with new technologies until they can be fully vetted and approved by their overstretched tech teams.  I truly understand protecting one’s interests, one’s data and ensuring the end user is being protected from malicious companies.  However, agencies and networks are being asked for more efficiencies, transparency and performance from the media buy which would mandate outside platforms are used within buys. This requires a 4^th party ad call to be made when ads are served.

These creative optimization and verification tools like Doubleverify, Adometry, Adexpose, and Tumri are relatively new and each have their own methodology to how they render the ad call and report on the buy.  All different methodology, but they all require a call to be made to their servers to process the data.  If you’re like 90% of all online display agencies you are probably serving the creative through your 3^rd party server for many reasons.  If you add the optimization and verification code to your tags, you are now making a 4^th party call and in violation of all major publishers and won’t be able to serve across their content until the product is certified or you remove the code.  Seems reasonable if the certification process was a 2 day turn around.  But, that’s not the case and many startup’s and clients are being denied the right to optimize, verify and attribute conversations across these platforms on a site by site basis because the publishers will not certify the technology fast enough.  This certification process can take months and we all know that a month is like a year in the digital space!    The online industry is all about quick thinking, resolution driven start ups that fill a need fast.  The need today is for better transparency, optimization and reporting across the exchanges, networks and DSPs.

Yahoo, Google, AOL, MSN – act now, time is of the essence!

We as an industry need to push these publishers for approval of useful and beneficial startups so we can better manage clients’ media.  This isn’t a request from most advertisers and agencies, it’s a demand.  We’re growing the online display space and taking on larger budgets.  With these shifts in media allocations comes accountability.  We are now seeing more money in the space and we want to keep it here so we can continue to creatively evolve the medium.  Approving technology partners faster and with more accuracy will do the trick.  Declining them simply because you enjoy a wall around your garden is to no one’s benefit. It’s an open source world and every major publisher needs to be comfortable vetting and understanding new products developed outside their war rooms.  Publishers, put the onus on the start ups to provide everything you need to certify their product, but make sure the certification is quick and accurate so we can continue to advance.   Otherwise, we could see budgets start shifting back to mediums where clients are more comfortable, and that benefits absolutely no one.

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