SMART optimizes consumers’ online and mobile experience by continuously enforcing ad-quality standards, alerting on any violations and facilitating the instant removal of disruptive, annoying and harmful ads.
June 06, 2016 — McLean, VA — The Media Trust, the global leader in monitoring and protecting the online and mobile advertising ecosystem, announces the availability of SMART—which stands for Scan, Measure, Analyze, Resolve, Track—a complete suite of SaaS-based services and actionable processes to assure digital ad quality, performance, data privacy and security. Designed to continuously scan, measure, analyze, resolve and track creative quality, SMART enables publishers and their various upstream partners in the digital advertising ecosystem to block and then remediate—in real time—any disruptive, annoying or harmful ads. With SMART, publishers gain real-time control over the ads served to their audience, while also realizing improved revenue continuity, reduced labor costs associated with the manual review and remediation of an ad, and enhanced communication and collaboration across the ad serving supply chain.
The only solution of its kind, SMART leverages The Media Trust’s comprehensive suite of ad tag monitoring and alerting services, which are powered by the Company’s proprietary scanning technology. In continual operation since 2005, these services scan more than 30 million ad tags and millions of websites each day, which provides The Media Trust with an unprecedented view of the digital advertising ecosystem. As a result, the SMART program has created the industry’s most comprehensive, up-to-date database of creative and technical policies against which the SMART services monitor and evaluate ad tags. These policies address four major categories of publisher concerns:
- Security: detects and alerts on all unknown, suspicious and malicious activity as well as out-of-browser redirects.
- Data Leakage: detects and alerts on the lifespan, utilization and purpose of all authorized and unauthorized cookies, including flash cookies, DOM-storage manipulation and history sniffing.
- Ad Quality: detects and alerts on fraudulent, offensive, competitive, black-listed or channel-conflict ads as well as auto-play audio/video, pop ups/unders, shaking/flashing appearance and more.
- Ad Performance: detects and alerts on any violations of download size, number of connections, latency, etc.
Anytime an ad exceeds a policy threshold, SMART immediately flags the ad and sends a real-time alert, which contains the information needed to resolve the violation. To ensure all ads continually comply with the client’s and The Media Trust’s policies, SMART monitors, inspects and analyzes tags both pre-launch and in flight. The suite of services also monitors any changes made to the ad’s technical components in flight and seamlessly supports all advertising mediums: display, rich-media, video, native, paid content, search and mobile.
“With consumers’ growing dissatisfaction of poorly performing or placed ads and the increased use of ad blockers, it’s critical digital publishers and ad tech providers in the digital advertising supply chain only serve high-quality ads that perform as intended and are not infected with malware,” says Chris Olson, The Media Trust’s CEO and co-founder. “Only SMART provides the continuous, 24/7 quality assurance services that detect and alert—in real time—on all industry and client-specific policy violations related to malware, data leakage and privacy, and creative and technical performance. With SMART’s quality assurance services and industry-leading database of creative and technical policies, digital publishers can improve the online/mobile user experience, achieve greater revenue continuity and protect their brand equity.”
To speed the remediation of policy violations, SMART alerts authorized upstream partners—in real time—of any non-compliant activity, which significantly compresses the remediation cycle from days to minutes, while also improving the overall health and security of the online and mobile digital ecosystem.
The explosive growth in ad blockers, with one in five smartphone users now using this technology, is a direct byproduct of the public’s intense anger and frustration with disruptive and even destructive online and mobile ads. To stop this trend, digital publishers must take immediate steps to gain exacting control over the ads served to their site. The Media Trust’s SMART program provides this real-time control by enabling the continuous, 24/7 enforcement of all security, IT, data privacy and creative policies to each ad served. As a result, digital publishers gain granular visibility of and continuous control over the ads served to their site and helps streamline their incident response processes, ensure revenue continuity and deliver a consistently positive brand experience for both themselves and their advertisers.
About The Media Trust
The Media Trust works with the world’s largest, most-heavily trafficked digital properties to provide real-time security, first-party data protection and privacy, performance management and quality assurance solutions that help protect, monetize and optimize the user experience across desktop, smartphone, tablet and gaming devices.
As the global leader in monitoring the online and mobile ecosystems, The Media Trust leverages a physical presence in 65 countries and 500 cities around the globe to continuously scan websites, ad tags and mobile apps and alert on anomalies affecting websites and visitors alike. More than 500 publishers, ad networks, exchanges, agencies and corporates—including 40 of comScore’s AdFocus Top 50 websites—rely on The Media Trust to protect their website, their employee internet use, their revenue and, most importantly, their brand.
