TAG, or the Trustworthy Accountability Group, is an organization that includes many big names from the digital advertising industry. The focus of the group is to function as a centralized location to lead the battle against ad fraud and other types of criminal activity within the digital advertising industry.
Thanks to a major contribution from Google (a member of the group) TAG has been able to create and launch a pilot version of a new system that could be a game changer in the fight against ad fraud. The system is based initially on a database that lists data centers known to be major sources for fraudulent activity. This database was created by Google.
TAG CEO Mike Zaneis said, “Google built an army of anti-fraud engineers around the Spider.io acquisition. They’ve spent a tremendous amount of time identifying this data center traffic and it’s as robust of a database as any in the world. It’s a great starting point for TAG, and we’ll build off that from the intelligence.”
This database is going to be combined with other information and resources from big names such as Facebook, The Trade Desk, Dstillery, Quantcast, Yahoo, Rubicon Project, TubeMogul and others. While this certainly won’t end all ad fraud, it is expected to be very effective at helping to take out the biggest sources.
Many criminal groups have either crated or infected data centers with the intent of using them to generate huge amounts of fraudulent traffic. This traffic accesses ad inventory and creates fake views or even clicks. By identifying the data centers where this traffic is coming from, the system will be able to block access to ad inventories more effectively. Any ad networks that use the system will be able to effectively stop traffic from some of the largest fraud sources.
The pilot program is expected to run through October and then hopefully launch on a larger scale. This is something that all marketers will want to follow closely as it will be a significant change in the industry.
