Military-Grade Ad Verification. Interview with Daniel Avital, CSO CHEQ

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.

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

Letting Consumers Take Control of The Ads They See. An Interview with Joe Mandese.

As consumers take more control of who they allow into their viewing space, advertisers will have to be more cognizant of how their ads are delivered and received. Joe Mandese, Editor-in-Chief of MediaPost, has been working on an initiative called Bid/r which has the potential to change the ad delivery dynamic. 

Charlene Weisler: Over the next three years, what are the greatest changes facing the ad community?

Joe Mandese: Nigel Morris, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, Dentsu Aegis Network, when asked the same question a few years ago, said, “The problem is we’ve shifted from an era of information scarcity to one of information ubiquity.” He meant that advertising originally evolved in a world of finite media options -- a handful of newspapers, magazines, TV and radio options -- where big advertisers and agencies had the leverage of their ad budgets to efficiently buy people’s attention. If you had enough money you could buy enough reach and frequency to scale people’s attention.

That started to break down with the explosion of media options in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to multichannel television. Today, literally every single human being on the planet is a media channel. The supply of media options is virtually unlimited. The signal-to-noise ratio between consumers and brands has grown out of whack, and to paraphrase Nigel Morris, we’ve shifted from a time when there was a scarcity of media to one when there’s a scarcity of human attention.

Weisler: What is Bid/r?

Mandese: Bid/r is a marketplace where brands can bid directly for a finite supply of the most valuable consumer attention: attention consumers want to pay to a brand.  Users download a simple app to “list” themselves on an exchange where they receive offers directly from brands. There is a cap on the amount of “inventory” they can trade to five minutes daily, because we want both consumers and brands to understand the scarcity and value of their attention. Consumers are in total control of their trades and brands only pay when the consumer fulfills 100% of the terms of the trade.

Brands can offer anything they want to win the user’s attention: samples, swag, unique experiences, access to media content, even cash and for any action they want the consumer to complete, not just paying attention to an ad, but higher order functions like visiting a brand’s site, downloading information, sampling a product, participating in research, enrolling in a loyalty program, etc.

From a consumer’s perspective, it’s like Tinder for brands. They see a feed of potential brands and swipe left or right depending on which ones they actually want to engage with. From a brand’s point-of-view, they might be looking to have a first date with a consumer or build a long-term, lasting relationship.

Weisler: Can the industry solve for ad blocking? For fraud? For viewability?

Mandese: Of course, but it comes down to defining what the industry means by “ad blocking,” “fraud” and “viewability.” Depending on how you define them, all of those problems have always existed for the advertising industry.

People have always had the ability -- with a few exceptions -- of controlling what ads they see or not. I used to quip that print media like newspapers and magazines were the original digital interactive media. If you saw an ad you didn’t like, you flipped the page. I remember seeing Brian Monahan (formerly at Walmart and now at Pinterest) present data on TV commercial zapping and said, “The biggest threat to our TV commercials is not the DVR, it’s people turning their heads.”

Right now, ad blockers are making it easier to skip ads, but we’re already seeing a new generation of anti-ad-blockers and even more recently a generation of anti-anti-ad-blockers. It’s as if the ad industry has entered into a rapidly escalating arms race with its own consumers.

Same with fraud. We have new jargon like “non-human traffic” or “non-viewable impressions,” but those behaviors always existed and it was just a question of how -- and how much -- they happened, not whether they happened. When I started covering the business, agencies had virtual armies of ad checkers to handle “discrepancy resolutions” for ads they were being charged for that never aired or aired in the wrong way. Those problems have always existed, and if anything, technology has made it easier for brands and agencies to detect them.

There are a number of promising blockchain technologies that will likely help, but it’s all premised on advertisers and agencies defining exactly what they want -- and don’t want -- and communicating it clearly as part of their contracts with the media.

Weisler: What metrics do you think are the most important indicator of a successful ad campaign?

Mandese: It comes down to what a brand and agency are trying to achieve with their ad campaign. It can be multiple things -- exposure, engagement, action, etc. -- but ultimately, they have to focus on one key indicator they use to measure performance.

I’m a big fan of time-spent and duration metrics, not just because it’s what Bid/r is premised on, but because I think it’s the best way to measure if a user was actually engaged with the ad campaign. What that duration should be, is up to different stakeholders -- brands, agencies, media, and yes, even consumers -- to hash out, but I think the time of using simple impressions or exposure-based metrics is over.

I think the Media Rating Council’s (MRC’s) new “digital audience-based measurement standards,” and the fact that they are duration-weighted, is a step in the right direction, because it creates an even playing field for all stakeholders participating in a measurement method that they all agree to. But ultimately, they have to agree about what they’re agreeing to measure.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Note:  Jack Myers and Charlene Weisler are both investors in Bid/r.  Joe Mandese was the editor of The Myers Report newsletter, the forerunner to MediaVillage.