White Lists Can Improve Brand Safety and Help Fight Ad Fraud

With the proliferation of low quality “fake news” websites and outright ad fraud, advertisers are looking for ways to ensure that their ads show in safe, reputable environments to real people. A number of tools and products have come into existence to deal with both of these issues. Companies like White Ops, DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science all have offerings to help combat fraud and low quality placements.

One of the oldest practices in the Programmatic space is the use of Black Lists. A Black List is a list of sites and apps that are excluded from a campaign. Ads cannot run there. In the past this has been very effective but conditions are changing. During the past year many sites publishing controversial clickbait content have sprung up – in addition, fraudulent sites have sprung up that only run for a few days only to be replaced by new sites before the blacklist can take effect.

One tactic to combat these problems is the White List – a campaign using a White List can only run on the listed sites. In essence, every other site and app is “blacklisted”. White listing has many advantages plus a few disadvantages.

Some advertisers build a small list of permitted sites, sites like Yahoo.com, Weather.com and CNN.com. These sites have lots of available impressions and a campaign may be able to achieve scale while running on a fairly small list. The problem is that this flight to quality can lead to much higher CPM costs and depending on the scale of the campaign, the possibility of insufficient inventory.

The way to get past this potential shortage of impressions and high cpm costs is to build a larger list of quality sites. This is the approach that JP Morgan Chase has taken. This is also the approach we use at Konetiq. We curate a list of several thousand content rich high quality sites to run our campaigns on. This assures quality and also maintains a reasonable CPM cost. We can then customize the list for each client based on performance.

In our rapidly changing environment we need to find creative ways to maximize performance and minimize the threats to our brands and budgets. White Listing is one tool to help with this but we need to continually evaluate the ad space to make sure we’re staying one step ahead of developing threats while taking advantage of new tools and opportunities.