Ghostery and IPONWEB Collaborate to Deliver Verified Domains Service

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - September 08, 2014) - Ghostery and IPONWEB today announced Ghostery Verified Domains, a domain verification service based on real user data, which enables BidSwitch demand partners to authenticate the quality of digital advertising inventory in real time. With programmatic spending expected to reach $18 billion globally this year, there are mounting concerns in the digital advertising industry about the authenticity and quality of ads delivered, further driving a need for transparency during the bidding process.*

In recent pilot tests comparing Ghostery's Ghostrank™ data from more than 20 million anonymous endpoints with IPONWEB's BidSwitch™ data of over 20 billion daily bids, as much as 40 percent of paid digital advertisements were placed on unverified and masked domains, which indicates that the ad placement could be fraudulent.

"Safeguarding our clients from ad fraud is a fundamental business objective," said Platform161 CEO Marco Kloots. "By pre-emptively identifying potentially fraudulent traffic from mis-represented and masked domains, the Ghostery Verified Domains service delivers invaluable visibility and provides our clients with confidence about the quality and effectiveness of their strategic campaigns."

Ghostery Verified Domains gives digital advertisers confidence in their placements. By processing Ghostery Ghostrank panel and BidSwitch pre-bid data, Ghostery Verified Domains assigns domain status classifications for all or selected supply partners, flagging them as follows:

• Verified = True site domain match -- traffic quality is verified.
• Unverified = Matching process reveals multiple and varied domain sources -- traffic quality may be suspect.
• Masked = Full domain source parameters are not revealed as publisher made a conscious effort to hide their identity -- traffic quality is verified.

"Ghostery Domain Verification delivers a level of visibility into the quality of ad inventory and underlying domain sources that has not been possible before for enterprises," said Ghostery CEO Scott Meyer. "By working together, BidSwitch customers can tap into the intelligence gathered from real, anonymous internet users, as seen by Ghostrank, and provide demand partners invaluable transparency into their real time bidding (RTB) ad transactions."

IPONWEB's Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, Scott Neville said, "With BidSwitch, our vision is to provide a central infrastructure that helps to solve many of the underlying technical challenges intrinsic in real-time trading. Transparency and fraud are a key focus here and the collaboration with Ghostery represents an exciting opportunity to uniquely package up domain verification at the bid-level and empower demand partners with more transparent, informed and brand-safe decisioning."

Ghostery Verified Domains Service is available to all BidSwitch clients trading in Media or Connect modes and is enabled through myBidSwitch UI. To learn more, please contact us.

About IPONWEB
IPONWEB is an industry pioneer and world leader in the Engineering & Operation of highly customized, real-time media trading platforms and technologies. With more than 10 years experience driving innovation in the ad exchange and real-time technology space, IPONWEB is the 'behind the scenes' technology provider that many of the worlds leading industry players rely on to successfully power their businesses.

IPONWEB's u-Platform technology is used to customize and deliver more than 50 enterprise real-time trading platforms for advertisers, DSP's, Trading Desks, SSP's and DMP's across the Americas, Europe and Asia. 

IPONWEB's BidSwitch technology represents an infrastructure-level "Switch" that facilitates more than 100 Supply and Demand technology partners globally to quickly, efficiently & transparently connect & trade display, mobile and video inventory.

Ghostery
Ghostery, Inc. is a global marketing technology company that provides online transparency and control to individuals and businesses. Millions of people around the world have installed Ghostery's easy to use browser plug-in to see and manage the information they share with companies online. Ghostery Enterprise puts the same power in the hands of professionals and enterprises. Ghostery Enterprise's Marketing Cloud Management software enables enterprises to better manage their marketing cloud, improving data governance, site performance and vendor management. Ghostery Enterprise also offers privacy governance to enterprises, ensuring that companies comply with privacy standards and offer transparency to online users.

*Source: Magna Global Ad Research, June 2014