Profanity, Nudity, Malware – Oh My!
If you read our blog you’ll know we are big supporters of ad verification and what it’s doing to keep the DSP and network industry honest. But with all good things come some inherent trade-offs. Who hasn’t received a verification report with malware, profanity, nudity, pornography and other categories in big bold letters as to say your client is only running on the worst inventory possible? You’d think there is nothing good about online advertising, until you look more closely.
The reality is that some malware, at some point, may have been posted on some of these sites. Or profanity may have been on a user-engaged site but was quickly removed. Or maybe they showed a stock image with someone in a bikini. It seems that right now the categorization engine companies are making a whole lot of money by using scare tactics and not as much for doing an accurate job of portraying reality to their clients. So, the next time you get your verification report, forget the scare tactics and big bold letters. Actually click on the sites and go there. See if it’s truly objectionable content, or if somewhere in some corner of the site someone may have gotten away with something by mistake.
Lest we forget, there is carnage, murders, and terrorism reported in our newspapers and nightly local news every single day.
August 11th, 2010 at 9:32 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Melissa Cassera and Jay Friedman, Jason Deal. Jason Deal said: RT @jaymfriedman: NEW BLOG: Is verification just serving to scare people? (not when done right…) http://bit.ly/diXRQY [...]
March 12th, 2013 at 11:35 am
[...] written a number of times about the benefits of ad verification to all players in the digital ecosystem. This includes [...]