DMEXCO, Europe’s leading digital marketing & tech event, took place in Cologne on 21th and 22th of September. AdSecure was thrilled to be exhibiting at the event, catching up with industry trends and having great conversations about Ad Tech with other exhibitors and visitors. One of the main issues we discovered was the lack seeing the importance of a robust ad compliance solution, so in this special DMEXCO report, we are going to share with you 4 key insights we learned at DMEXCO:

• The need for clean programmatic ads
• Online brand safety for publishers, ad networks and advertisers
• Lack of awareness of the importance of ad compliance
• The rise of contextual targeting in a cookieless world

The need for Clean Programmatic Ads

According to Statista, Programmatic Digital Advertising will account for more than 90% of total digital display advertising spending in the US by the end of 2022. And this is expected to continue to grow over the forthcoming years. The reason why programmatic media buying has become the preferred method of buying ad space is that, instead of performing time-consuming and manual procedures such as RFPs, meetings and discussions, it uses software and complex algorithms to distribute targeted advertisements automatically.

Share of programmatic in digital display advertising spending in the United States from 2019 to 2023

Among several types of programmatic media buying, Real-time bidding (RTB), also known as open auction or open marketplace, is the most popular way nowadays. Most of the visitors that I met with at DMEXCO were interested in AdSecure’s ad quality solutions, were programmatic advertising platforms or agencies about how to ensure they serve clean programmatic ads. So if you are part of the programmatic ecosystem, we have good news for you! AdSecure is now able to support RTB integration and assist you to effectively monitor your DSPs ad quality and ad performance. Ultimately, the integration can help you:

• Avoid your publisher partners' complaints about serving bad ads to their end users
• Identify problematic DSPs and make informed decisions
• Strengthen brand reputation and keep good relationships with partners
• Serve good-quality ads to the end users for higher conversion rates and revenue

To ensure you are serving safe, clean programmatic ads, AdSecure now allows RTB integration. Check out our news How to prevent malvertising with AdSecure’s new RTB Integration. To find out more about how AdSecure performs RTB analysis, please contact us now!

Online brand safety for publishers, ad networks and advertisers

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), brand safety is defined as keeping ad networks, publishers and advertisers brand reputations safe. In practice, this means avoiding placing ads next to inappropriate, unsavory, or irrelevant content, or avoid placing inappropriate, unsavory, or irrelevant content advertising next to a publisher site content.

There should be increasing concern for online brand safety because it always played an important role in the digital world, however, it is not always as the brand management teams expect - even the social media giant Twitter sometimes experiences brand safety complications.

Article - Exclusive: Brands blast Twitter for ads next to child pornography accounts

The brand of any business is one of the most important assets that they own, therefore Brand Safety is definitely a topic all digital companies should have at the top of their priority list. In online advertising, many brands don't want their names or ads to apprear on websites related to pornographic, fake news, or violent content; but some other content can be considered inappropriate too, such as content associated to drugs, alcohol, politic ideologies, extremism, religions, etc. By pairing with a partner like AdSecure, with experience in providing brand safety for online advertising, it can ensure that your marketing strategy is consistent with your brand's value, and protects your revenue, compliance and end users.

Ad compliance is at the heart of AdSecure's range of solutions, for this specific problem our Content Classification and Keyword Detection features are the best choices for you to reinforce your online brand safety strategy. Whether you are a platform or publisher, AdSecure can provide excellent coverage to monitor your ad tech supply chain or website content and flag any ads that could cause issues for you.

Lack of awareness of the importance of ad compliance

"I don't care what advertisers promote or how their landing pages look, they'll pay us anyway!"

This was one of the comments we heard from a few ad tech companies that we spoke to at DMEXCO. On a wider scale, this way of thinking is probably common amongst many programmatic platforms or advertising agencies. As an ad security and ad quality solution, our main goal is to provide 360 degree ad compliance to help contribute to a safer online environment. It is a shame to see how many platforms in the digital marketplace still choose to look away from ad security and ad quality and only focus on earning margin from exchanging adverts.  

Globally, everyday bad actors inject malvertising into the online advertising space. You only have to read our Q1 & Q2 Violations Report to see how widespread this criminal activity is. Revenue is absolutely important for any business, but a good reputation and strong partner trust will ensure business success in the long term. The media regularly publishes examples of malvertising attacks naming and shaming ad tech companies that have helped to spread malicious advertising, which means if you are named in one of these articles, existing and potential clients can discover this with a simple Google search, harming your company’s reputation which will impact revenues and growth potential. 

AdSecure recommends that any online advertising companies pay more attention to ad compliance, especially those who don't have dedicated compliance teams to manage and control the campaigns served to the partners and end users. Understanding the importance of ad compliance not only aligns your business with industry standards, you are also helping beat bad ads and therefore, contributing to a trustworthy and sustainable digital world through your own efforts.

The rise of contextual targeting in a cookieless world

Since Google announced in January 2020 that Chrome will phase out third-party cookies, brands, publishers and ad tech companies have been looking for news ways to target, measure, tailor and personalize their campaigns and deliver relevant, effective messages to the new digital world.

Cookieless Future MasterClass in DMEXCO2022

In order for advertisers to deliver advertising to the right audience without wasting time and money, contextual targeting is attracting increasing attention as third-party cookies are being deprecated. Contextual targeting, refers to the digital advertising method of displaying ads on the web pages based on the content of those pages, through tags, keywords and intelligent algorithms. This is no doubt a great solution for advertisers or marketers who, in the future, will be unable to target audiences behaviorally by accumulating data and analyzing browsing history of end users. In fact, Harris Pull's research this year found that 79% of consumers are comfortable seeing contextual rather than behavioral ads. This shows that contextual advertising, compared to behavioral targeting, can provide the audience with a more positive and personalized experience, without compromising their privacy, which is essential for strengthening the relationship between advertisers and consumers.

With multiple privacy-focused regulations rolling out around the world, the advertising industry and ad tech companies need to stay agile to be able to continue to serve relevant advertising in a variety of ways. However, it is already reasonable to predict that contextual targeting will grow into a dominant targeting format over the next few years.

Thank you DMEXCO

DMEXCO made a spectacular comeback after a 3-year break due to the pandemic, bringing together digital experts and innovation drivers to have great conversations face-to-face. AdSecure took the opportunity to have important conversations with industry leaders and learn about the digital transformation, new ad tech concepts and ideas and understanding the future challenges that face the digital business ecosystem, of which AdSecure is proud of being part of.

Thank you DMEXCO, we are looking forward to the next one!