Trust Metrics 2017

We end the year with a great quote from Ross Benes a reporter from Digiday .

“Thanks to digital skullduggery, brand safety remains hotter than the devil’s anvil.”

The notion of a hot anvil, paints a picture of someone who is going to be burned or “branded”. To me this illustrates the consequences by neglecting brand safety.

It also can mean we all now know and can no longer dismiss brand safety and the “hotter” reference means the awareness. A lot of the issues of today did not just happen overnight, but everything was more amplified in 2017.

You can’t be that buyer, planner, client, or decision maker that walks into 2018 eyes wide shut.

 I have collected our press from 2017 to share with you, have a great new year.

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Digiday 12/22

The state of brand safety in 5 charts

Marc Goldberg, CEO of anti-ad fraud vendor Trust Metrics, said brand advertisers should be leading the conversation on brand safety because if they don’t care about it, nobody else will.

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Emarketer 3/24

For Marketers, a Brand Safety Wake-Up Call : Google ad controversy forces new focus

The Google ad boycott is more than a black eye for the internet giant, it’s a wake-up call to the advertising industry. And that may not be a bad thing, according to Marc Goldberg, CEO of Trust Metrics, a publisher verification firm.

“Google’s position at the moment has put a lot of advertisers in a concerning situation,” said Goldberg. “But what’s happening is good news for the industry.”

“Brands control the conversation, and as more brands start to bring programmatic in-house, they will ultimately be responsible,” Goldberg said. “They need to understand that risk.”

Programmatic ad buying has introduced a lot of new concerns, according to Goldberg. “Google’s not perfect, but this recent issue is a punch in the belly for the programmatic industry, especially because Google didn’t get it right.”

At bottom, the problem was advertisers were not keeping an eye on where messages ran. “There was a lack of human involvement,” Goldberg said. “We need to do a better job maintaining quality supply across the ecosystem. We need to stop thinking it’s all about scale.”

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AdAge 4/17

WORLD WIDE WHITELIST: WILL BRAND SAFETY STRIP THE WEB OF ITS COLOR?

"There is not a million sites that make sense for all advertisers," said Marc Goldberg, CEO of Trust Metrics, a tech firm that grades online content for quality. "The number of marketable domains is much smaller."

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Exchange Wire 11/15

Whitelisting: The White Knight for Brand Safety?

(Why consider it? ) Marc Goldberg, CEO, Trust Metrics Whitelisting is an obvious solution for sensitive brands. “Each brand has different safety criteria and thresholds of sensitivity”, explains Goldberg. “A whitelist, in our eyes, is custom to each brand. Pharma companies, for example, have a tendency to become very specific where they want be adjacent to, due to the fact they have real legal risks associated with the promotion of their medicines.”

“Whitelisting can also help reduce nonhuman traffic”, explains Trust Metrics’ Marc Goldberg. “When you start looking at some of the domains in these exchanges, you can see that some of these sites are just designed to steal advertising dollars. Be inclusive, not exclusive. By creating a whitelist, you will avoid sites like these.”

Marc Goldberg, CEO, Trust Metrics highlights that whitelisting is only a first step and context and intent are so important in this scenario: “You don’t flag The New York Times because they did a movie review of ‘Straight Outta Compton’ and quoted a few lyrics, and you don’t approve [photo-entertainment website] theCHIVE because they have three articles on credit repair.”

“News sites are not universally acceptable”, continues Goldberg. “Some buyers don’t consider the nuance between brands and industry. You can’t create a ‘global whitelist’ and transact on it without considering your clients’ needs.” Trust Metrics created the News Trust Index for this reason; to help brands include news, but also make sure they are not appearing on fake news, conspiracy, hate, or highly controversial partisan sites, if that is a concern.

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Digiday 5/26

‘We’re often working with one second’: Most viewable ads are gone in a flash

 Since some publishers are gaming the viewability standard to appease advertisers, viewability should be treated as a transaction metric, not a marketing goal, said Marc Goldberg, CEO of brand-safety firm Trust Metrics.

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AdWeek 10/5

Demanding More Stringent Measureme

nt, Some Brands Are Using Their Own Viewability Standards

While advertisers should be loud about what they want and always ask for more, the burden will now fall more on the publisher and agency to either accommodate or educate their clients,” said Marc Goldberg, CEO of Trust Metrics. “Brands need to develop multiple KPIs and monitor the results and optimize to quality viewability environments.”

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NY Times 12/26/16

Advertising’s Moral Struggle: Is Online Reach Worth the Hurt?

Marc Goldberg, chief executive of Trust Metrics, an ad safety vendor, said the effort to remove bad actors ignored the fact that many advertisers value impressions over everything else. They would rather not choose and monitor what websites they are appearing on, he said, because they worry they will miss out on potentially lucrative destinations.

“What they’re doing is introducing all of these bad sites into our ecosystem and not having the means to monitor them appropriately and effectively,” he said. “The big problem in our industry is our expectations of scale are not aligned with reality.”

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Ad Age 10/5

P&G, FORD AND OTHER TOP BRANDS KEEP ADS FLOWING TO RT'S SITE

 "You can create a list of sites you don't want to run on, but it is the unknown sites that will be their downfall and put their brand at risk," says Marc Goldberg, CEO of Trust Metrics, a publishing technology firm that addresses brand safety concerns. "For every Breitbart they know, there are hundreds of other sites they don't know about."

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DIGIDAY 11/7

Advertisers often avoid hard news, but there’s mixed data to back this up

Advertisers have long used keywords to avoid extreme content, but now that practice is being extended to regular news coverage, which can mean legitimate news sites get blocked. That’s prompted people like Marc Goldberg, CEO of fraud detection company Trust Metrics to call for a return to a focus on context.

“Conspiracy and highly charged partisan sites that are designed to enrage and engage are the concern,” Goldberg said. “These are the sites that marketers are trying to dance around. News is both still a reach and frequency vehicle for marketers and is too important to neglect.”

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Business Insider 12/21

Google says its ads.txt initiative to clean up digital advertising is seeing strong adoption, but new data suggests otherwise

While ads.txt will ultimately help raise publisher ad inventory that has been devalued by counterfeit inventory in the market, some publishers have still been hesitant to take the leap, said Marc Goldberg, CEO at Trust Metrics, a company that monitors digital transparency, quality and fraud.

"There's still confusion, but publishers need to do this because of the risks they face, and are still losing money," he said.

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The Drum 12/20

A look at ads.txt adoption, its benefits, and the challenges ahead

Likewise, Marc Goldberg, chief executive of auditing firm Trust Metrics, raises how one of his company’s recent audits of ads.txt files – freely available by inputting the text ‘/ads.txt’ after a website’s URL – found well known fraudulent players present.

He points to loopholes that are currently being exploited by fraudsters such as fake news peddlers are duping buyers by mimicking legitimate sites by using URLs such as ‘thedruk.com.co’ (a mock example).

They are then able to evade being blacklisted by DSPs by then exploiting self-reporting loopholes by tagging themselves as satire (while serving ‘fake news’ to all intents and purposes). Such loopholes need to be closed down, according to Goldberg.

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THE VERGE 3/21

Google revamps policy on ads and offensive content after UK YouTube boycott

Marc Goldberg, CEO of the ad safety vendor Trust Metrics, said Monday that the UK boycott of Google ads could signal an important shift in the industry, as brands demand stronger safety protections from companies like Facebook and Google. He believes part of this shift is due to social media, which has brought wider attention to even small-scale incidents.

“The industry is misaligned, and the buy side can correct it if they want,” Goldberg said in a phone interview. “The buy side really owns the opportunity to put more strict requests in, and if the supply side is not following suit, then the buy side should, for example, do what Havas did, and stop spending.”

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Ad Age 11/28/16

CATCHING THEIR AD TECH IN BED WITH FAKE NEWS, MARKETERS ASK FRAUD FIGHTERS FOR HELP

Still, many brands simply don't want their ads appearing on fake news sites. Marc Goldberg, CEO at Trust Metrics, said his team uses a combination of technology and human intervention to flag fake news sites. The company began focusing on fake news well before it gained widespread coverage by the media, he said. To date, it has flagged thousands of websites.

"I'm actually a little disappointed that fake news is just about Google and Facebook and that it's just their problem," Mr. Goldberg said. "Fake news, which is a byproduct of the clickbait economy, is the same thing as other fake sites that are just sending bots. It's the same thing because they're both designed to steal advertising dollars."

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Digiday 10/9

After cutting back site list in March, JPMorgan Chase has doubled the number of sites it advertises on in the past six months

Marc Goldberg, CEO of brand-safety firm Trust Metrics, said whitelists and blacklists need regular monitoring and updating in order to be effective, so it’s not that surprising to a see brand open up its campaigns to more sites after testing a new strategy.

“Neither a whitelist or blacklist is a static document designed to set and forget,” he said.

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Digiday 3/23

From the Unintended Consequences Dept: Viewability mandates cause more ad clutter

We are seeing more publishing sites with aggressive advertising layouts trying to meet the [viewable] thresholds that are being requested,” said Marc Goldberg, CEO of brand-safety firm Trust Metrics. “These examples end up for users as the reason to ad block.”

Goldberg said that buyers emphasizing viewability has in turn incentivized websites like The Buzz Tube, That’s Not Food, and Silly IMG to feature many ads at the top of the page. Their pages are littered with ads from Google AdSense and content-recommendation engines Taboola and Revcontent, but very little, if any, content separates the ads. The Buzz Tube was the only one of these websites with enough traffic to be detected by comScore, which said it had about 900,000 unique visitors last month. Its Facebook page, which is liked by about 150,000 people, mimics content farms by mixing in its own articles with viral content from other websites.

Goldberg said that inventory from these websites sneaks into ad networks because networks are more concerned with weeding out bot traffic than in maintaining quality inventory. When viewability becomes the predominant thing that advertisers want to reach, the networks have further incentive to let quality slide if it can help them reach the KPI.

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Marketing Land 3/3

Whitelists vs. blacklists for programmatic media: Should you use whitelists or blacklists, and does it matter? In the age of fake news, says columnist Kevin Lee, it should matter a lot to programmatic advertisers.

 When I specifically discussed the whitelisting option with Goldberg, he emphasized that: “Whitelisting used to be just about safety. In brand safety, the absence of swears and nudity equaled quality. We now believe quality also includes the presence of good publishing features (UX, UI, depth and breadth, ad clutter, layout and additional factors). Most bad guys don’t have quality sites and will not be selected to make the list.”

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Buzzfeed 4/4

In Spite Of The Crackdown, Fake News Publishers Are Still Earning Money From Major Ad Networks

Marc Goldberg, the CEO of Trust Metrics, a company that evaluates online publishers and apps for quality, told BuzzFeed News that “there is still a significant amount of money to be made” in fake news.

He said that in evaluating sites many ad networks “are not really for the most part looking for quality. They’re looking to see if it meets the minimum threshold: It’s not porn, it’s not hate or guns.”

Goldberg of Trust Metrics said fake news sites will just keep moving to new ad networks, even if they pay less than those in the top tier.

“Once [Google] kicked them out then it continues to keep going down the food chain — and that’s where all of these guys live,” he said.

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Emarketer 5/23

Facebook's Leaked Content Guidelines: What Marketers Should Know :Balancing free expression and brand safety can be difficult

Every brand has their specific set of criteria in terms of their own limits and thresholds,” said Marc Goldberg, CEO of Trust Metrics, a publisher verification firm. “I don’t think this leak will impact Facebook’s business, but it will introduce new conversations around specific concerns and whether the company is doing enough for brands.”

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Digiday 7/13

Why video ad fraud remains a persistent problem for ad buyers

“Buyers continue to let people on their media plans that don’t play by the rules and rarely care about user experience,” said Marc Goldberg, CEO of fraud detection firm Trust Metrics. “Video is, and will always be, a target for the bad guys.”

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Which-50 11/2

Here Is What The IAB’s Ads.Txt Ad Fraud Initiative Will Do And What It Won’t Do

 According to Marc Goldberg, CEO, Trust Metrics, “A whitelist plus ads.txt will be a good way to mitigate by providing a roadmap to the set of desired domains. Ads.txt creates a path back to potential makegoods if the agency/advertiser looks at reports post campaign and see sites that were not on the original lists. It also now provides more than just a path, but explicit directions to the destination.”

He cautioned however that the one thing txt has not done is improve the supply pool. “You still need a fraud vendor, you still need safety measure.”

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Digiday 2/23

Blast from the past: Pop-unders are back in vogue for ads

“Distance doesn’t demonstrate deniability,” said Marc Goldberg, CEO of fraud detection company Trust Metrics. “Plausible deniability is not a long-term strategy.”

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Digiday 1/24

Content mills test whether false domains boost Facebook traffic

“Unless a Facebook representative has explicitly told you that this an A/B or a different URL is OK, I would be very careful,” said Marc Goldberg, CEO of measurement firm Trust Metrics. “Because they will treat you as a spammer even if you have good intentions.”

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Digiday 1/18

How programmatic firms deal with complex pharmaceutical laws

Marc Goldberg, CEO of verification firm Trust Metrics, said that pharma companies are usually proactive about brand safety and that many of them deploy whitelists to limit their ads from reaching undesirable webpages.

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Digiday 12/5/16

Ad tech profits from ads on fake news — and preventing ads on fake news

 â€œThis problem is not going away,” said Trust Metrics CEO Marc Goldberg. “But there are some solutions that can help it from getting so big. But we need help on the supply side to not let these guys [fake news] in, in the first.”

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Digiday 8/28

How big sporting events become magnets for ad fraud

What makes these sites tough to detect is they blend in seemingly organic traffic with their paid traffic. For example, the fraud sites will set up Twitter accounts that automatically tweet links associated with the most popular hashtags of the day, said Marc Goldberg, CEO of anti-ad fraud firm Trust Metrics. Some people following the hashtags click on the links out of curiosity. Even if a link takes them to a junk site and they click out of it, the user unwittingly just contributed human traffic to the fraud site, and if the fraud site gets enough human traffic, it might avoid getting flagged by verification services.

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The Drum 4/10

Marketers renew focus on cross-channel measurement and attribution this year, edging ahead of programmatic

And that may not be a bad thing, according to Marc Goldberg, CEO of Trust Metrics, a publisher verification firm.

“Google’s position at the moment has put a lot of advertisers in a concerning situation,” said Goldberg. “But what’s happening is good news for the industry.”

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Buzzfeed 5/10

Facebook Is Going To Punish Websites With Junky, Sexy Ads And Little Content : The social network is now scanning links to see if they contain “disruptive, shocking or malicious ads” and little real content.

Marc Goldberg, the CEO of Trust Metrics, a company that evaluates online publishers and apps for quality, told BuzzFeed News that Facebook’s decision to down rank links from sites with low-quality ads could help choke off revenue for fake sites and fraudulent publishers.

“Fake publishing, fake news — there is a tremendous underbelly there that continues to siphon off ad dollars,” he said. “Cutting it off from parts of the ecosystem will be very, very helpful.”

He also said Facebook’s effort could be positive for the higher-end content-recommendation ad companies, and punish bad players that trick users with misleading ads.

“Recommendation engines that have stricter policies will be rewarded because now they’re not playing against competition that doesn’t care about the end user or the advertisers,” Goldberg said. “Ultimately this potentially the improves the user trust downstream, where now you’re going to see a lot less of these ads designed to produce curiosity clicks. That can help earn back the trust of advertisers and users.”

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Le Monde 4/4

In the turmoil, YouTube tries to reassure advertisers

"But the machines are not infallible," says Marc Goldberg, director of Trust Metrics, a company specializing in the fight against advertising fraud.

"Between the non-human audience, the sites of false information and the hate speech, brands are more worried than ever," says Goldberg