Havas Media Group Launches New Offering To Tackle Ad Fraud

To improve media inventory and campaign quality, Havas Media Group has announced the launch of its Meta Quality Barometer, a data measurement tool to help optimise campaigns and deplete ad fraud.

The Meta Quality Barometer from Artemis Alliance delivers continuously updated data across global, pluri-media campaigns, to share with all stakeholders (technology partners, media publishers and clients) to optimise investments.

Dominique Delport, global managing director of Havas Media Group explained: “Confidence in data quality is a critical issue for our industry. The scale of fraudulent inventory generated by sophisticated ‘bots’ is extremely concerning and neither media vendors nor agencies are safe. We need to bring trust and clarity back for our clients.

“For these reasons Havas has invested in our best-in-class Artemis Alliance data platform for over a decade. Now it manages 100 per cent of our online campaigns, harvesting over 300 billion secure and disaggregated data points each year and was recently awarded ISO27001 certification by Bureau Veritas. Its focus – to create an actionable measurement for viewability, brand protection, media inventory and campaign quality.

“As a result, we are delighted to launch the first Meta Quality Barometer for our industry. Helping us to connect the dots of the most advanced tech providers, delivering a unique and systematic ‘meta’ barometer on data integrity, security and brand safety. This will facilitate and boost our communications with media owners to increase the quality of inventory for our clients. I am extremely proud of the teams in Artemis Alliance who have formalised a systematic approach to challenging industry practices so that we can help to provide better business solutions for our clients and media partners.”

Leveraging its extensive experience in handling event level data, Artemis Alliance collects detailed and raw data from all of its technology partners (Adledge, Catchpoint, ClarityAd, Hub’Scan, WhiteOps, Integral Ad Science and Peer39/Sizmek). That data, at its most granular level, is used to analyse and score the quality of the media inventory by industry, by market and by media owner.

Rob Griffin, EVP, media futures and innovation, Havas Media Group summarised: “This is a win-win deal.  We can now pull in data from across all screens, technology companies and media partners to provide the first external, objective review of outcomes across the five critical areas of Compliance, Experience, Impact, Context and Traffic.

“While we can’t guarantee 100 per cent viewability or zero fraud, we can make a commitment to our clients and our publishers to improve the quality of inventory available and make the information clear and easy to activate. The ultimate win, therefore, will be for clients, who will benefit from smarter solutions and cleaner data to drive investments and business decisions.”

Using these data, the Meta Quality Barometer covers five main areas:

1. Compliance: Matching impressions against purchased media

Artemis Alliance rates media owners’ compliance with campaign directives: promise (purchased versus delivered media) and technical qualifications (specifications and requirements).  Artemis Alliance constantly audits both tagging systems (with partner Hub’Scan) and creative work provided for each campaign (with partner ClarityAd).

2. Experience: User experience

Artemis Alliance takes into account user experience and user interaction with campaign messages, in particular how long it takes for pages and ads to load for users (with partner Catchpoint), as well as where the ads are located on the page.

3. Impact: Viewability and performance auditing

Artemis Alliance can correlate performance (in particular in terms of audience) and viewability of media campaigns, to gauge their impact, through automatic and personalised tracking for each advertiser and for each action.

4.Context: Media content and brand safety

Brand safety services are codes inserted in campaign tags which allow Artemis Alliance to protect a brand’s image, quantify the number of blocked impressions (undesirable context), and identify the context where these impressions were delivered (with partners Adledge, Peer39).

5.Traffic: Securing campaign distribution

To combat the rise of illegitimate Internet traffic worldwide, Artemis Alliance provides teams with both manual and technological solutions. Media teams identify and blacklist all suspect URLs based on abnormal click-rates, coded URLs and pages without ads. Artemis Alliance also works with several anti-fraud technology solutions to better protect our campaign results (with partners Adledge, Peer39, Integral Ad Science, White Ops, etc).