More advertisers than ever are turning to verification tools in attempt to tackle the problem of misplaced ads, AdWeek reports.

Kent Wakeford, chief revenue officer of AdSafe, said: “The use of verification is growing exponentially. It’ll become standard in online media buying.”

Misplaced ads have been troubling the industry already before the internet but during the digital era the problems have escalated.

Some estimates suggest that up to 15% of all campaign impressions are non-compliant. Ad verification company DoubleVerify has said their service can find campaigns in which 80% of the ad impressions are in violation of the insertion order.

Future in preventing technologies

The reporting approach, by which most ad verification services operate, has been critisised by some. An ideal service would prevent the ads from showing up on dodgy sites in the first place.

Marta Martinez, svp of operations at MediaMath, said: “The reporting approach is exposing the problem, but making it difficult to provide the solution. The future is in the prevention technologies.”

Some ad verification services do offer prevention services, but problems are said to occur, for example, when advertisers buy from exchanges. Most filtering technologies also suffer from the problem of ‘false positive’.

Kurt Unkel, director at Publicis Groupe’s VivaKi Nerve Center, says a campaign running on a Miami Dolphins website was flagged for “suggestive content” due to photos of the cheerleaders.

He said: “It [the filtering technology] can create more problems it solves.”

Source: AdWeek