mediamathMediaMath announced an aggressive rollout of the IAB’s “ads.txt” initiative across its entire supply footprint throughout MediaMath’s Curated Market, the company’s guaranteed brand-safe, fraud-free premium media offering, within which the company will only buy over authorized paths from publishers who have an ads.txt file in place.

By ensuring that customers are dealing with legitimate publishers and by taking a hard line on traffic that is acquired via illegitimate means, the company believes it will deny perpetrators of these frauds the monetary benefit they seek. In fact, his approach has already produced dramatically effective results, furthering the company’s mission to access only legitimate human traffic on verified, trusted properties. Since its launch in April 2017, the Curated Market has already demonstrated significant lift across a broad range of marketer business outcomes when compared to the open auction environment.

“Bringing ads.txt into our arsenal of fraud prevention resources strengthens our ability to protect our clients,” said Lewis Rothkopf, General Manager of Supply at MediaMath. “Working in consultation with outside experts, we’ve found that no single tool or third-party vendor alone is likely to be able to prevent all instances of fraud, particularly as the tactics and techniques used by ‘bad actors’ evolve. Instead of taking a one-size-fits-all approach, we leverage a variety of technological and human methods that considers first and third-party inputs, to ensure that our ecosystem is brand-safe and fraud-free.”

The ads.txt rollout will be phased in over the coming months to ultimately encompass all MediaMath’s supply products, providing publishers sufficient time to create and implement the ads.txt files on their web sites.

“We strongly support the ads.txt initiative and universal adoption across premium publishers will be required for it to fully reach its potential,” said Jeremy Hlavacek, Head of Global Automated Monetization at IBM Watson Advertising. “We applaud MediaMath for taking this strong stance in ensuring that everyone on the supply side contributes to this important initiative.”

MediaMath has been monitoring supply-side uptake of ads.txt, an open standard sponsored by the IAB, since it was announced in May of this year. While the pace of publisher adoption of the initiative has been relatively slow, the company expects that with a buy-side impetus, those rates will begin to rise.

By insisting on ads.txt, MediaMath clearly proves that it believes in good customer-centric advertising, delivering relevant and meaningful marketing experiences across channels, formats and devices. Rather than engaging in a never-ending cat-and-mouse technical escalation with fraudsters, MediaMath is focusing its efforts on stopping fraudulent activity at its source by eliminating the economic incentives for ‘bad actors.’

Powered by advanced machine learning algorithms that buy, optimize and report in real time, Mediamath’s platform gives sophisticated marketers access to first-, second- and third-party data and trillions of digital impressions across every media.

By MediaBUZZ