Why you should consider working in ad verification?
Ad verification solutions ensure human traffic, correct placement, and target audience reach for digital ad campaigns.
What is ad verification?
Ad Verification is a process consisting in confirming that digital ads, especially for campaigns running on the open web and through programmatic auctioning, are viewed by humans, displayed in the intended locations, and reached the target audience. More specifically, ad verification enables advertisers to confirm that served ads match their campaign settings, such as site, geographical, or content parameters, and in a brand suitable environment. This is accomplished by deploying verification tags with the ad to analyse the publisher's page content and ensure suitability and compliance with standards. The ad-verification vendor then provides reports to the advertiser or agency for analysis of placement and performance. This independent, third-party verification aims to identify and exclude publishers with low viewability or high fraud traffic early in the campaign, rather than preventing ad display outright.
Ad verification vendors possess distinct advantages within the adtech sector, given their strategic positioning that encompasses the entire advertising value chain. Here are the implications for key roles within these companies:
Why build a career in ad verification?
1. As a sales person
Ad verification companies support all aspects of the ad tech business, from the buy-side to the sell-side. "We work with publishers, agencies, advertisers, and innovative media buying platforms," explains Stuart Dickinson, UK Account Director at Adloox. "It's very exciting because one day we might be discussing highly technical issues with traffic managers and data analysts at an agency, and the next day we're exploring broader brand and strategic challenges with marketers at major advertisers.” Overall, working in sales within the ad-verification sector enables engagement with all industry stakeholders, promoting more intelligent and eco-responsible advertising, and selling a service that meets and adapts to client needs.
2. As an engineer
In essence, ad verification is an engineering-driven process. Ad verification vendors must be at the cutting edge of real-time bidding and programmatic buying methods, as well as digital advertising more broadly. These companies develop highly sophisticated algorithmic models and machine learning systems to detect advanced fraud types and invalid traffic, and to analyse, understand, and categorise content adjacent to advertisements, providing robust brand safety and suitability firewalls.
"Fraud detection is a primary goal for our research team," says Christophe Bourgoin, Lead Data Scientist at Adloox. "We collect vast amounts of data across multiple dimensions – web, traffic, semantic, lexical, behavioural, bidding, and more – and build statistical rules and machine learning models to identify fake domains, bots, and advertising malpractices."
Another engineering perk is that ad verification platforms collaborate with the largest ad tech platforms and maintain constant contact with the product and engineering teams of digital giants such as Google, Amazon, and Meta. This provides an additional layer of knowledge acquisition and professional enrichment.
3. As a technical account manager
Technical account managers and support teams maintain direct and regular contact with clients. They are at the coalface, tackling the recurrent technical issues faced by media buyers, traffic managers, and ad ops managers. Often possessing extensive careers in the industry, they are intimately familiar with the language, intricacies, and nuances of major demand-side platforms (DSPs), supply-side platforms (SSPs), and ad exchanges.
Their role is crucial in ensuring that tags are correctly implemented on ads and that campaigns are properly configured. Acting as constant allies to clients, the rewarding aspect of their work lies in delivering significant value through their deep industry knowledge.
Written by Alex Beaurepaire, Head of Marketing at Adloox