MediaMath Promises 100% Viewable, Fraud-Free Impressions Across Mobile, Online and OOH

Blockchain is making its way to the ad-tech sector.

Today, MediaMath rolled out the beta version of what it’s calling Guaranteed Viewable Market through a partnership with Underscore CLT, a startup that professes to use blockchain technology to better illuminate the often murky programmatic sector.

The demand-side platform (DSP) claims Guaranteed Viewable Market offers “impression-level verification” for ad space on desktop, mobile and out-of-home inventory, using its identity solution to assure advertisers their ads are 100 percent viewable and fraud-free.

Underscore CLT, a blockchain-based startup once financed by MediaMath’s investment fund Math Capital, says it can better ensure transparency by using numerous factors, such as placement characteristics and publisher contextualization, to assess the likelihood of an ad being seen by a human.

All of this is performed before the DSP bids on an ad impression, which is then verified for its viewability and fraud score by third parties Moat and DoubleVerify, with the results finally recorded in an immutable ledger.

Lewis Rothkopf, MediaMath’s head of supply products, said that buying viewable media at scale has historically been a notoriously difficult feat and described the latest rollout—available now in beta in North America and APAC—as “the way media should work.”

Isaac Lidsky, Underscore CLT president, added, “If we’re going to build a new, brighter future for the digital marketing industry using blockchain, we must focus on functionality and tackle the real-world business implications of this momentous opportunity and all that it represents for our businesses. The Guaranteed Viewable Market is proof.”

Per advocates of the technology, recording the transactions of the programmatic supply chain along the way of an ad’s delivery to a blockchain allows advertisers to more accurately and more efficiently track how their ad dollars are spent.

Although there is some debate as to whether or not the technology can verify the huge amount of transactions involved in programmatic media trading at the speed necessary to be effective, research into its development is ongoing.

Last year, the IAB Tech Lab established a Blockchain Working Group to better educate the market as to the application of such technology in the media trading space with more than 150 companies now participating in the group.

Its activity also involves educational sessions and attempts to establish technology standards in order to better ensure the interoperability of vendors’ technology as well as the launch of a pilot program.

Ronan Shields

@ronan_shields

Ronan Shields is a reporter for Adweek, focusing on ad-tech.