Adelaide raised a $7 million seed round in 2022, backed by Human Ventures.
Playground xyz (GumGum)
Founded in 2008, the contextual targeting company acquired attention vendor Playground xyz in December 2021, meaning it can offer both contextual targeting (through GumGum’s Verity) and attention measurement through Playground xyz.
It’s currently having over 75 conversations globally with former Oracle Advertising clients, the firm told ADWEEK.
“These verification companies offer customers a one-stop-shop for media measurement,” said Rob Hall, global president of data at GumGum, but “they aren’t known for being the most advanced in specific areas.”
In 2021, GumGum raised $75 million from Goldman Sachs, bringing its funding total to $122 million. Customers include T-Mobile, Disney and Clorox, and it has 600 staffers globally.
Specialist fraud tech
Like death and taxes, fraud is as good as certain in digital media. With new types of fraud cropping up, detection companies are evolving, using AI, automation and data science to create a variety of tools and methodologies, from preventing fraudulent clicks on ads, identifying and mitigating the impact of bot traffic and verifying media quality.
Adalytics
Adalytics has amassed a ton of media attention over the last two years for its fraud reports. These have also gone some way to contribute to critics’ questions about how effective traditional ad verification firms are.
Its tech analyses brand media spend, but just a small part of this relates to fraud. For instance, a brand could learn how much of its ad spend goes to MFA sites. It hasn’t had a noticeable uptick in inbound leads over the last month. Aside from offering media analytics beyond fraud detection, the firm differentiates by only working with brands on the buy side to avoid conflicts of interest.
DeepSee.io
DeepSee, which started in 2021, has had two former Oracle Advertising clients get in touch, one of which is already using its platform, said CEO and co-founder Rocky Moss
While other firms might have a viewability or IVT product, DeepSee rates the quality of publishers based on the experience of using the site and provides raw data around site behaviors detected by its crawlers. Rather than telling an advertiser whether an impression is viewable, its data might say that a site has an average number of ad units in view at a time that account for a certain percentage of the total visible screen.
DeepSee and Jounce Media have worked with trade bodies to define and verify MFA sites.
Human Security
Human, formerly White Ops, has been offering fraud protection for 12 years and helps prevent fraudulent ads pre-bid with server-to-server integrations, evaluating each impression before it reaches the auction.
“We’ve certainly seen a recent uptick as customers seize the opportunity to upgrade their protection,” said Geoff Stupay, vp of media Strategy at HUMAN. “We verify the humanity of 20 trillion interactions each week, providing unique visibility to not only identify fraud but takedown bad actors.”
Current customers include One View by Roku, FanDuel and Yeti.