DoubleVerify Wants to Teach the Industry About MFA

Ad verification firm DoubleVerify is trying harder to explain to the industry what it does.

At the Cannes Lions Festival, the firm announced the DV Transparency Center, a hub containing written articles and a webinar series explaining DV’s tech and industry hot topics, like made-for-advertising sites, social media measurement and brand safety, and fraud.

“This is a very dynamic space and, over the past six months, there have been a handful of topics that warrant an acute focus,” Dan Slivjanovski, DV’s chief marketing officer, told ADWEEK, speaking from DV’s yacht in Cannes this week.

After being accused of not catching that marketers were buying ads on an MFA site thinking that it was Forbes in April (Slivjanovski said DV did identify the site as a low-severity MFA and made its customers aware), the firm wants to dispel some myths about what ad verification tech can and can’t do.

Why we care: Ad verification firms have had a rough ride lately. Headlines from research firm Adalytics’ probe into fraud have buyers doubting their value. Slivjanovski—and buyers interviewed for this piece—note that DV hasn’t lost customers, but it is being asked more questions. In early May, DV’s share price dipped nearly 40% after the firm reported its first-quarter earnings, in which revenue increased by 15% year-over-year, but it lowered its full-year revenue guidance by 3.9%. 

The transparency hub: Articles in the hub outline DV’s three-tier MFA identification tech. And since not all MFA is fraud (sites fueled by bots or invalid traffic are identified by other DV tech), the marketer chooses if they want to buy in that environment depending on the severity.

DV is also touting how it can support publisher monetization. Publishers have grumbled that ad verification firms’ prebid blocking tech, as well as their MFA tools, unduly prevent them from monetizing inventory, without telling them why. U.S. news publishers lost $4.1 billion in 2020 due to flagrant brand safety keyword blocking, according to cybersecurity firm Cheq.

DV points to its Publisher Suite, which helps publishers maximize ad inventory revenue and reduce friction with buyers.

However, the DV Transparency Center stops short of giving full transparency about its products, since outlining how fraud detection tech works gives bad actors the upper hand.

Industry commentary: While ad buyers interviewed for this piece agree that more clarity on what ad verification firms do is welcome, they would like to see more granular analytics into the ads they buy and whether they get served where they’re supposed to.

“Clearly, they don’t get me the depth and detail that [challenger analytics firms] do,” said one senior executive at an ad agency. “What we need are analytics to help us make manual decisions in the DSP (demand-side platform).”

Buyers also note that fraud like domain spoofing can’t be caught in prebid products, but only in the measurement stage once the ad has run, by which point the damage has been done. DV has additional tools like Programmatic Analytics that go deeper into the supply chain and mismatches in campaign delivery.