We work in an industry where transparency has traditionally been difficult to come by and this has only become more difficult to police as ad-tech and media companies continue to proliferate. ABC, with JICWEBS, the UK’s equivalent of the Media Ratings Council, launched in December 2013 an industry wide self-regulatory scheme for digital media suppliers under the leadership of their Digital Trading Standards Group. The DTSG’s goal is to protect brand safety and reduce the risk of digital ad misplacement. To this end, they’ve published a set of Good Practice Principles.

Exponential is pleased to announce today that our DTSG Seal of Compliance has been reissued for another year.

This follows the successful outcome of an audit of our brand safety and ad placement protection policies by the ABC. The audit itself was even more rigorous compared to last year and involved scrutiny of significant evidence to demonstrate Exponential’s commitment to each of the Good Practice Principles.

This year, ABC focused on a few key areas where we had to demonstrate extensively our continued compliance with the DTSG’s Principles. These included:

• Providing trading agreements, IOs and publisher agreements as evidence for explicitly directing our clients towards our Terms & Conditions on the buy and sell side that include provisions for minimising the risk of ad misplacement.
• Providing documentation on the on-boarding processes for new publishers into our network with explicit reference made to brand safety and how the Publisher Code of Conduct ties our partners into compliance with this.
• Providing documentation and a clear Brand Safety Policy on how we minimise risk that is accessible by clients.
• Email update for our clients communicating our Brand Safety Policy update and Privacy Policy.

Further comments can be found in ABC’s press release and Marketing Blog