Political Digital Digest: The Safety Issue

It’s clear that 2016 will be a breakthrough year for programmatic advertising in politics. In fact, just this week, Borrell Associates raised its digital advertising estimate for political in 2016 by 8%, now projecting a 620% increase over 2012 spending.

Programmatic media buying offers the ability to target voters more efficiently, at scale, serving relevant creative across devices. But with that promise comes a host of pitfalls that political buyers need to be aware of: fraud, quality, and brand safety.

Fraud

Smart buyers must protect themselves and their clients from the outright theft of their advertising dollars through fraud, but also have to be conscious of the environments that their ads appear in. At their most benign, misplaced ads are wasteful, and at their worst, they have the potential to be extremely embarrassing and damaging to a campaign.

Ad Quality

Campaigns are struggling to find scale within quality content, with a reported 70% of premium publishers blocking political ads as a vertical on the open exchanges. Doing the extra legwork to create private marketplace relationships with publishers directly – or working with a partner who’ll take on that heavy lifting – is essential this year.

Brand Safety

Centro is at the forefront of combatting fraud and creating safe, high-quality ad environments, and we made it part of our mission to educate marketers about these topics. So for this issue of Political Digital Digest, I’m going to focus on articles that highlight what you need to know to stay safe in the rough neighborhood of digital ads.

Each issue of Political Digital Digest brings you the latest news and developing stories about the innovative role digital media is playing in the 2106 election. Everything you need to know is right here, right now.

What You Need to Know

Examining the Ad Fraud Marketplace

http://www.campaignsandelections.com/campaign-insider/2674/examining-the-ad-fraud-marketplace Campaigns & Elections reminds us that if it sounds too good to be true…

Group finds campaign ads on ISIL-inspired videos http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/03/30/group-finds-campaign-ads-isil-inspired-videos/82446396/

The worst-case scenario example of why quality has to be a concern.

How Much of Your Audience is Fake http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-click-fraud/

A great behind-the-scenes overview of the fraud problem from Bloomberg

Why the Open Exchange Isn’t Always Ideal for Political Buyers

http://adexchanger.com/politics/why-the-open-exchange-isnt-always-ideal-for-political-buyers/

Who Should Be Responsible For Stopping Programmatic Ad Fraud?

http://marketingland.com/responsible-stopping-programmatic-ad-fraud-152412

If it’s in everyone’s long-term interest to stamp out fraud, why aren’t more stepping up? A look at the layers of participants and the role they play.

DSP Spotlight: Buying for Quality with comScore Bid Ratings https://centro.net/blog/centro-dsp-spotlight-buying-for-quality-with-comscore-bid-ratings/  Learn how to use this data to select the best-quality inventory for your campaign in Centro DSP.

Webinar: The Many Faces of Ad Fraud: Our ad fraud expert, Ian Trider, is hosting a 3T Spotlight webinar on April 20, focused on how you can protect yourself against the many forms of ad fraud, learn more here.