Branded content is a marketing strategy that has gained significant traction in recent years, but...
Programmatic advertising has grown at an astonishing rate over the past few years, enabling advertisers to reach their desired audience, efficiently and at scale. The desire for reach has led to many collaborations between publishers, exchanges and AdTech partners, but it’s also made the online advertising ecosystem incredibly complicated and at risk from fraud as more and more parts are added to the chain. The answer? Authorised Digital Sellers, otherwise known as Ads.txt
So, what is ads.txt?
Introduced by the IAB in 2017, ads.txt has been well received by publishers in the UK with an adoption rate of 83% among top 1,000 domains (Jan 2018). It’s essentially a text file, approved by the IAB, which enables publishers to prevent unauthorised sales of their online inventory by listing all the companies that they do allow to sell it. The publisher adds a simple text file on their web server containing all the companies they’ve authorised to sell their inventory.
How do buyers check?
Ads.txt protects programmatic buyers from spending budgets on counterfeit inventory. It’s pretty simple to ensure you’re buying the genuine thing. Simply add /ads.txt to a website to ensure that you are buying from authorised digital sellers of a particular domain. For more on how to add or check ads.txt visit www.iabtechlab.com/how-to-ads-txt
Other industry Initiatives
Partly in reaction to the rise of ad blocking, the industry has come together to form The Collation For Better Ads. It’s aim is to improve online advertising for consumers in order to secure revenue streams which fund free content and valuable journalism. Our non-interruptive native formats conform to CBA guidelines. You can find out more at www.betterads.org
How TAN supports industry initiatives
Our non-interruptive native formats conform to CBA guidelines and all of our creative specs detail our support. Our publisher team fully supports Ads.txt, working with publishers to ensure they include the relevant Ads.txt files within their sites, signalling to programmatic buyers that this inventory is authorised.
