ComScore‘s Industry Trust Initiative has partnered with eight demand-side platforms to launch a product that it says will help promote higher quality media and a more transparent programmatic supply chain.
The new tool, called Bid Ratings, helps programmatic platforms judge the value of each impression up for auction and determine how much to bid on it. Based on pre-bid analytics technology that ComScore acquired when it bought Proximic earlier this year, Bid Ratings scores inventory using viewability, invalid traffic (IVT), contextual categories, page content and site rank data. Based on those ratings, buyers can optimize their campaigns towards better quality sellers and placements.
ComScore says that, at launch, Bid Ratings will be available in eight global markets including Canada, the U.S. and U.K. So far, eight DSPs have integrated the solution for pre-bid inventory screening, including several prominent players in the Canadian market such as Eyereturn, Turn and TubeMogul.
“Trust is earned in advertising, and objective verification matters,” said TubeMogul CMO Keith Eadie, in a statement. “Given that many brand advertisers we work with already rely on ComScore’s reporting, integrating Bid Ratings into our enterprise software to help them apply filters pre-bid and have an additional way to make reporting actionable was an obvious next step.”
Bid Ratings is an upgrade to Industry Trust Profiles, which ComScore’s Industry Trust Initiative launched in Canada in January. The new product will incorporate the historical viewability and IVT data that powers Trust Profiles along with Proximic’s contextual analysis technology (which incorporates predictive analytics as well as real-time contextual scanning of the environment around an ad impression for brand safety issues, page quality and custom attributes).
Other verification providers like Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify also provide solutions for pre-bid quality filtering, though these tend to come from dedicated specialist vendors rather than audience measurement companies.
The full list of DSPs that have integrated ComScore Bid Ratings also includes AppNexus, Centro, Millennial Media (recently acquired by AOL), Netmining (a subsidiary of IgnitionOne) and RhythmOne.
