THE FUTURE OF BRAND SAFETY & SMART AD VERIFICATION – CARAT & AMNET SET THE STANDARD FOR FUTURE COLLABORATION

Fast growth, technical revolution and artificial intelligence breakthroughs. China’s digital landscape is evolving at a rapid pace but with change comes complexity and challenges.  Carat and Amnet, together with strategic partners are setting out the next standards to increase brand safety and ad verification for advertisers in China.

In 2016, the total digital ad spending in China increased by 32.9% to reach 290.27 billion RMB.  Driven by the huge market size and performance-driven ecosystem, more specialized supply roles have emerged in the crowded market, triggering complexity in media buying and greater challenges for ad verification. The whole industry is looking for applicable solutions.

Carat is working with Amnet, Dentsu Aegis Network’s programmatic arm, to step up the battle, leveraging data and technology to stay at the forefront of ad verification and guarantee a brand-safe environment for media buying.

Lawrence Wan, Amnet China Managing Director: “it is our responsibility to ensure our advertisers ads are delivered to the right person, right place, right time and increasingly, it’s not just about “right” but “real”.  We’ve been working in a number of ways to find real solutions.  The past 12 months have seen us developing proprietary tools to ensure proper transparencies are achieved, and also embrace strategic partnerships with China’s leading ad technology, verification and data providers to add more value. “

The key partnership both Dentsu Aegis Network brands have been developing since 2015 is a strategic alliance with Adbug. Adbug is China’s leading local third-party ad verification company, applying their verification services including Chinese language analysis, ad environment detection and ad fraud identification into Amnet proprietary campaign platforms.

Weichong Khor, Head of Digital and Ecommerce at Carat China, added: “To ensure media visibility and access to premium inventory, we’ve been beta testing and now launched proprietary platforms to plug into the multiple-layers of technology stacks including demand side platforms, supply side platforms and 3rd party ad verification platforms such as Adbug and RTB Asia. This is seeing great results and we’ve had positive feedback for the proactive move across key client audits.”

Setting out the development plan for the next 12 months, Wan confirms that in addition to technology-related partnership, Amnet is working with its strategic data partners including Shanghai Data Exchange; “we are accessing their complete and verifiable unique audience pool to identify active ID’s and evaluate campaign performance – and it’s not just for a select few advertisers, we’ve set this as basic level for all Carat and DAN programmatic advertisers.”

As elected members of the MMA China board, Amnet was the executive sponsor to launch the ad verification sub-committee in 2016.  Now, Amnet and Carat’s MMA committee leadership has pushed forward the release of China’s first three standards for ad verification “Brand Safety Verification Guidelines for Mobile Ads V.1.0”, ”Viewable Impression Measurement Guidelines for Mobile Ads V.1.0” and “Invalid Traffic Verification Guidelines for Mobile Ads V.1.0”.

As the current Deputy Chair of Mobile Advertising Guideline Committee, Khor concluded that despite the challenges, the future was positive. “we’ve been working with the industry and clients to align on the priorities for the next 6 months, in addition to the progress we’ve made now with a zero tolerance approach to ad fraud and compensation from vendors, we expect further gains to be made as we push ahead with tagging from external DMP’s and clients benefit from more flexibility with transparent pricing and cancellation policies,” he said.