Anti-Fraud & Transparency in CTV Advertising

Part of the blog post series: CTV Advertising Standards: IAB Tech Lab Standards & Guidance

Executive Summary:

Due to its explosive growth and premium environment, CTV is increasingly becoming the target of fraudsters, and fraud is a challenge that needs to be addressed before it can grow into programmatic selling.
Tech Lab’s anti-fraud initiatives (app-ads.txt, sellers.json & SupplyChain Object) focus on bringing transparency to the marketplace, and making it more difficult for fraudsters to operate. Support for the app-store identifiers & user agents guidance is also important to improve transparency in the CTV space.

Company	Display	Video	Mobile Web	Mobile Inapp	Date Certified
Cyber Communications Inc.	Impressions Clicks Viewability	Impressions Clicks Viewability	Impressions Clicks Viewability	-	June 30th, 2018 October 9th, 2019
D.A.Consortium Inc.	Impressions Clicks Viewability	Impressions Clicks Viewability	Impressions Clicks Viewability	Impressions Clicks Viewability	June 30th, 2018 November 13th, 2019
Yandex	Impressions Clicks Viewability	Impressions Clicks Viewability	Impressions Clicks Viewability	Impressions Clicks Viewability	April 30th, 2020

The Details:

One of the reasons CTV inventory is so valuable is that it is similar to broadcast TV — but with more advanced capabilities. This makes it a major target of fraudsters, as evidenced by the recent ICEBUCKET and Monarch exploits. While most CTV inventory is currently sold directly or within private marketplaces, for CTV monetization to truly scale, broader programmatic selling will be necessary. This makes it important for anti-fraud solutions to be built for CTV.

At Tech Lab, we are aware that ad fraud keeps evolving, and anti-fraud tools and efforts also have to evolve. We believe that transparency is the most critical, foundational means to help. That is the reasoning behind our key anti-fraud initiatives: (app-)ads.txt, sellers.json, and SupplyChain Object (SCO).

A quick overview of these initiatives:

ads.txt/app-ads.txt allows publishers to clearly indicate who their “authorized” sellers are. ads.txt is for web properties, while app-ads.txt is for mobile and CTV apps.
SCO, together with sellers.json provides transparency on the various entities involved in the delivery of an impression.

This transparency helps buyers take decisions around who they want to do business with throughout the entire supply path.

On the CTV front, app-ads.txt support is still lagging for 2 reasons: fragmented app-store support and more complex “content” relationships.

App Store Support: There are more app stores in CTV (and a lot of platforms without app stores), so getting the necessary meta-tags and app store identifiers supported in a consistent manner has been challenging, though the list of platforms supporting the app store identifiers has been growing over the last few months. (More info about the meta-tags required can be found in the app-ads.txt spec, and about the app store identifiers and user-agents can be found in this guidance)

Complex relationships: The video apps in the CTV ecosystem have a more complicated set of relationships that need to be represented. There are three types of entities that can sell CTV inventory: the app itself, the content producer, and the CTV platform. All three entities need to be able to express their authorized sellers as well as their relationships to each other. The Tech Lab Programmatic Supply Chain Working Group is working on an update to app-ads.txt to better support this ecosystem, and is expected to release it shortly. Stay tuned for this release — and see sessions from Tech Lab’s REBOOT 2020 event to get some early insights!

A related effort that we are working on is a new version of ads.cert, which has remained in beta for a number of reasons. This new version should have a higher likelihood of adoption, and will also support a number of additional use cases, including signed billing notifications in SSAI. These discussions are still in early phases, and we welcome participation if you are interested in solving some really complicated security problems at scale!

Overall, the industry is aware of the importance of providing a safe environment that advertisers can trust, and key players in the CTV space are already engaged in building up support for the transparency standards.