New Media Transparency Tools Are Coming to the Buy Side

The IAB has introduced two new specifications called buyers.json and DemandChain Object, ways for demand-side platforms (DSPs) to disclose their partners, as efforts to bring transparency to programmatic advertising are moving up the supply chain. First came ads.txt, a way for publishers to name the authorized sellers of its inventory, in 2017. Then came sellers.json, which supply-side platforms (SSPs) use to disclose their partners in order to bring transparency around reselling of impressions, in 2019. Now DSPs are being asked to adopt transparency tools that would help curtail fraudulent and malicious advertising. Buyers.json is essentially a file anyone can view (by adding ‘buyers.json’ to a DSP’s homepage domain address) that shows the companies buying ads through that particular DSP. However, some DSP-client relationships are confidential, so not every partner will be named publicly. In those cases, that specific partner can be disclosed within the DemandChain Object and shared only among parties involved in a transaction. Both buyers.json and DemandChain Object are available for public comment until April 30. Shining a light on the exact companies plugged into a DSP will ideally make ad fraud—an all-too-easy gambit within programmatic advertising—much harder. Louis-David Mangin, CEO and co-founder of Confiant, said bad actors can easily create new accounts within DSPs, so exposing the company behind those accounts should make it much more difficult to spin up another fraud scheme. “At the end of the day, the fact that buyer identity is not revealed leads to the malicious actors continuously reusing the same corporate entity, over and over again, to keep ... getting new accounts, DSP after DSP, day after day, and it has made for a very low cost-of-entry for a bad actor. And so, if there was buyer identity being controlled, it would be easy for the industry to create accountability,” said Mangin, whose company participated in the IAB working group that developed the new buy-side specs. John Clyman, vp of engineering, marketplace quality and security at Magnite, said in a statement that buyers.json and the DemandChain Object provide publishers and SSPs with “much needed” transparency equivalents that buyers now have. “Widespread adoption of these standards will enable the industry to better combat malvertising and nefarious behavior, and is a critical factor enabling publishers to more confidently monetize their inventory while preserving positive user experiences, promoting continued growth in programmatic transactions,” said Clyman. The main hurdle for these buy-side specs, like with ads.txt and sellers.json, will be adoption. SSPs were slow to adopt sellers.json, fearing too much transparency would lead to disintermediation, until The Trade Desk gave them a choice: disclose your partners or lose out on being big money from the market’s largest independent DSP. A DSP may only adopt buyers.json if a big-spending client demands it, especially since DSPs don’t have much incentive to take threats seriously from publishers, since money flows in the other direction. And at the end of the day, what publisher is in a position to say no to serious revenue, even a buyer that won’t identify itself? “It's easy for the buy-side to make a credible threat. It would be much harder for the sell-side to make a credible threat,” said Mangin. Amanda Martin, vp of enterprise partnerships at media agency Goodway Group, said buyers “obviously want to support efforts” that stomp out fraud and bad actors, which ultimately protects brands since their ads are less likely to appear against unsafe content. But given the massive disruption the industry is facing this year— such as massive changes to identity and general upheaval brought on by the pandemic—adopting buyers.json and DemandChain Object may have to join the list of other pertinent things on DSPs to-do lists. “How this initiative gets prioritized will be highly impacted by the fierce demands facing both the buy and sell side currently,” said Martin. “I do not foresee DSPs [having] an issue with this initiative. The question is, who should be responsible to build the architecture? The proactive role of the SSPs will be key.”