The following column was written by Brett Lofgren, senior vice president of global advertising sales, at Epic Advertising.
I get asked a lot about "quality" when it comes to ad networks. Quality is a very general term when applied to online marketing. However, even though the term may seem vague, there are some very discernable areas of value that quality networks provide to advertisers and publishers alike. In short, every great ad network should have a focus on quality, because if the traffic going through your network is poor or fraudulent, it creates problems for everyone.
The topic is so important, in fact, that there is an area of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) devoted solely to consistently maintaining and updating a set of standardized guidelines for advertising networks called the Networks & Exchanges Quality Assurance Guidelines. The guidelines are intended for networks and exchanges that drive online transactions with marketers and agencies. Epic Advertising's CMO, Mike Sprouse (who usually pens this column), is on the member committee, and many other reputable networks are also represented.
At its core, ad networks provide advertisers with immense scale and reach in an efficient way. They also offer advertisers a significant pricing advantage. Networks work with their publisher base to provide advertisers an ability to reach a large, yet highly-targeted audience, quickly and measurably. However, some less-than-reputable networks operate under the condition that "fast" necessarily must mean "of lower quality." Advertisers typically want customers, fans, followers, sales or to extend their brand. However, they don't want bad customers or fraudulent sales or for their brands to be associated with any nefarious websites.
This is perhaps where a strong ad networks' greatest value lies for an advertiser: in being able to protect advertisers' greatest assets, which most often is their brand, existing customers, image, and sales pipeline. In other words, reputable advertising networks are not hired by advertisers to provide traffic and ads of low quality, because advertisers want customers who could turn into lifetime customers and long-term brand advocates. The best ad networks typically have their own in-house compliance and legal teams, whose job is to ensure a safe and secure marketplace where advertisers feel confident, ad networks are able to do their job effectively and publishers are able to benefit from their quality traffic.
There has been a more intense focus on quality by advertising networks, especially in the last 18 months. As the recession started to loom, advertisers were facing dwindling budgets and the need to make their allocated investments "work harder." An obvious option for them was to move a significant portion of offline funds online (which is happening), and to work with strong ad networks to gain greater efficiency (which is happening). Ad networks realized they needed to have an intense focus on not only on ROI, but on the brand side of the equation – and have invested accordingly.
Detractors of the facts say this intense focus from advertising networks on quality is too new a phenomenon for the industry's claims to be accurate. I'd like to point out, though, that networks that are ahead of the curve have been talking about this for five years! So while some like to poke holes in ad networks and use the "lack of quality because of their size and scale" argument, many reputable ad networks have been spending the past half-decade hiring the best online security professionals and investing in technology and now have a respected presence in the online ad ecosystem.
Senior Vice President, Global Sales | Epic Advertising
