With all of the industry talk about ad verification, it may take a
former Israeli intelligence officer to develop a
military-grade protocol to detect and prevent ad fraud.
CHEQ, founded by Guy
Tytunovich, is positioning itself as “a cyber-security company looking to
replace traditional ad-verification platforms with a fully autonomous and pre-emptive
solution.” It is certainly an area of importance for agencies and advertisers who
are concerned about brand safety, ad viewability and fraud prevention.
I sat down with CHEQ’s Chief Strategy Officer, Daniel Avital, to
find out more:
Charlene Weisler: How does
CHEQ prevent ad fraud?
Daniel
Avital: Every time a user is about to be served an ad, our
system rapidly analyzes almost 700 parameters and sets multiple honeypots (bot
traps) to determine the authenticity of that user and ensure that only human
traffic gets served. The name of the game is speed – after analyzing all of
that data and making a decision, we need to prevent that impression from being
acquired by our client. All of that needs to happen in record speed.
Charlene Weisler: Does it
protect privacy?
Daniel
Avital: Ultimately, our mission is to protect the digital
ecosystem and privacy is a big part of that effort. To that end, we are fully
compliant with the new GDPR regulations and have brought on board designated
personnel to ensure that our privacy practices continue to be protective of
user privacy, which we believe to be a basic right.
Charlene Weisler: How does
CHEQ work in real time?
Daniel Avital: To enable real-time prevention, our engineering
teams have had to continuously optimize our algorithms to ensure all our fraud prevention
and brand-safety NLP (natural processing language) modules run simultaneously, cost-efficiently
and at great speed. This allows CHEQ to make an accurate decision before an ad
is ever served.
Charlene Weisler: Could it
be said that it is in the programmatic space or works with programmatic in some
form?
Daniel
Avital: We cover all digital advertising environments, including
programmatic, whether it be display or video - where we are introducing unique
and cutting-edge capabilities to the industry.
Charlene Weisler: Can CHEQ
be used for other media applications?
Daniel
Avital: Absolutely. At this point in time, CHEQ’s focus is on
transforming the ad-verification space (ad fraud, brands safety and
viewability), but our ultimate goal is to help advertisers take back control of
their digital media, a goal that transcends ad verification. Our R&D teams
are developing exciting applications for our tech which will give advertisers
new tools like Autonomous PR (crisis management, reacting to competitors,
breaking stories).
Charlene Weisler: How does the technology work?
Daniel
Avital: For fraud prevention, CHEQ's platform applies various
proprietary modules to detect suspicious non-human activity, data discrepancies
and behavioral anomalies. On the brand safety side, we apply advanced NLP
(Natural Language Processing) modules to intelligently analyze content at page
level and ensure advertisers only serve ads alongside brand-safe content.
Charlene Weisler: What
advice would you give a digital advertiser?
Daniel
Avital: Stress-test your ad-verification vendors and don’t
blindly trust the accuracy of their measurement and reporting. Do not put up
with a vendor who offers a “black-box” solution. Always ask them to provide you
with raw data (flagged IP’s, flagged “unsafe” URL’s, traffic sources etc.) so
that you can assess their work with an external party.
Charlene Weisler: Where do you see
your part of the business going in the next 3-5 years?
Daniel
Avital: We want to put the control back in the hands of
advertisers. Today the hottest issues are brand safety, ad fraud and
viewability but in the next few years we plan on transcending the verification
space and launching innovative products which will help advertisers get an even
stronger grip on their digital presence.
No comments:
Post a Comment