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The Root of the Problem: Fragmented Supply Chains
The brand safety layers aren't always perfect. The programmatic advertising ecosystem is highly fragmented, with multiple intermediaries handling ad placements. This complexity creates vulnerabilities that allow fraud, low-quality inventory, and misplaced ads to slip through the cracks. While DSP-level filtering plays a role in protection, it hasn’t been sufficient in preventing fraud and brand safety issues. Advertisers must go beyond DSP protections and take a holistic, supply-first approach to truly safeguard their investments.
A Multi-Layered Approach to Fraud Prevention
There has always been a significant amount of fraud in the AdTech space, making it a persistent industry-wide challenge. At AI Digital, through a combination of technology, human expertise, and strategic supply-side engagement, we built a framework that has helped our clients maximize working media dollars while eliminating fraud and brand risk.
1. Strengthening Supply-Side Controls
A key aspect of our approach is ensuring that we source only direct traffic. We’re able to do this at scale as we're working across all the different SSPs with no preference given to anyone over the other. This allows us to guarantee cost-effective, high-efficiency inventory for our clients. The supply-side strategy includes:
- Direct traffic acquisition: Working directly with premium publishers and trusted SSPs helps secure high-quality, direct traffic rather than buying deals from unknown intermediaries that can expose media buyers to poor inventory.
- Advanced fraud filtering: Our AI-powered filtering system is built to meticulously analyze traffic in order to identify and exclude fraudulent sources. Our system actively blocks Made-for-Advertising (MFA) sites and Invalid Traffic Sources (IVTs), complementing industry-standard compliance measures with real-time detection and prevention.
- Ongoing performance audits: Regular evaluations of supply partners ensure alignment with brand safety standards.
2. Combining Technology with Human Expertise
Technology alone isn’t enough to solve brand safety challenges. To be truly effective, technology must be combined with human intelligence (HI), a core principle of AI Digital’s approach, which integrates AI and HI in a blended programmatic approach.
- AI-driven monitoring: Our proprietary AI continuously scans bid streams in real time, identifying and filtering out fraudulent or unsafe inventory before ads ever go live.
- Fraud prevention partnerships: As an additional layer of protection, we collaborate with all the key brand safety players. Although they cannot entirely eliminate fraud, third-party verification tools and fraud detection technologies still play a crucial role in removing low-performing and non-brand-safe inventory.
- Human oversight: Tech or AI alone isn’t enough. While the DSP team and traders actively manage campaigns within DSPs, over the last few years, we have also put together a dedicated team focused on supply. This highly skilled team of experts is constantly optimizing, checking for fraud, and ensuring quality placements.
3. Smart Supply and Open Garden Solutions
Brand safety goes beyond just blocking bad ads. That’s why we’ve been addressing this issue from multiple dimensions to ensure our clients are buying the most premium and efficient traffic possible through a more transparent ecosystem.
- Holistic fraud prevention: Leveraging a decade of experience in programmatic optimization, we address brand safety issues at both the DSP and SSP levels. The Smart Supply solution ensures direct relationships with publishers and SSPs, streamlining the supply chain and filtering out low-quality, fraudulent, and non-brand-safe inventory before it reaches advertisers.
- Transparent inventory blending: AI Digital’s media placement is only focused on premium open-web and controlled environments, providing a secure and transparent advertising landscape for advertisers. Our Open Garden framework improves transparency by breaking down restrictive walls set by dominant platforms, ensuring advertisers have full control over their media investments.
- Eliminating bias & over-reliance on walled gardens: While walled gardens offer controlled environments, they often come with hidden biases and limited transparency, and are inherently biased towards their own inventory. AI Digital's Open Garden approach ensures advertisers are not locked into a single platform's ecosystem. Instead, we provide DSP-agnostic execution across 15+ platforms, giving advertisers the freedom to optimize their supply path while maintaining full transparency and control.
The Path Forward: A Transparent & Accountable Ad Ecosystem
With billions of dollars wasted annually due to ad fraud and misplaced ads, the industry must move toward a supply-first, transparency-focused strategy. Brand safety isn’t about placing blind trust in any single platform - it requires a proactive, multi-layered approach to safeguard both supply and demand. True security comes when advertisers take control of their supply chains, ensuring their investments are protected and their campaigns run efficiently. AI Digital can help. We offer free supply audits, AI-powered, custom-built media campaigns, and real-time optimization that not only help identify and eliminate fraud but also improve transparency and maximize ROI.
If you're interested in exploring more about how AI Digital is helping advertisers protect their budgets from fraud and ineffective placement, feel free to reach out.
Senior Business Development Rep, sifat.abir@aidigital.com
Key technical terms used in the article:
SSP (Supply-Side Platform): Technology used by publishers to manage ad inventory
DSP (Demand-Side Platform): Platform used by advertisers to buy digital ad space
MFA (Made for Advertising): Low-quality websites created primarily to generate ad revenue
IVT (Invalid Traffic): Non-human traffic including bots and automated scripts
