Our CEO Damon talks to The Drum about potential fraud in ads.txt and how the industry collectively must tackle this…
Tuesday 25th February - first published on The Drum
Below is the full comment from Ozone’s CEO, Damon Reeve:
What effect on transparency has ads.txt had since being implemented?
Ads.txt has been significant in helping buyers understand inventory supply chains and direct/indirect relationships sellers have with publishers in what is an otherwise opaque process. Since its introduction in [2015] it has been incredibly effective in reducing fraud in programmatic advertising. It's simple and vendor agnostic, which is a big part of its success.
Would the news that ads.txt has been compromised surprise you?
Is it all still moving in the right direction?ads.txt has had a significant role in reducing fraud, but there is still fraud and there are still fraudsters. So it doesn't come as a complete surprise that someone has identified a way to exploit different implementations of ads.txt for their own gain. Unfortunately no system or solution is perfect. If there are improvements that can be made then we should work towards implementing them, rather than saying it's not working.
What should the industry solution be?
Fraud generally exploits opacity. The best antidote is continuously working towards improving transparency in the supply chain (such as the rollout of IAB Tech Labs sellers.json and SupplyPath Object), improving the technologies used to manage (such as ads.txt) and calling out bad actors and practices.
