I worked with DV Fraud & Invalid Traffic Avoidance from the beginning of 2023, when I moved into the AdTech role, and my primary responsibility was to take care of the brand safety and suitability check from the agency perspective. That is when I started being in communication with DV Fraud & Invalid Traffic Avoidance, started verifying their tool sets and implementing them for the clients.
Omnichannel brand safety has improved campaign control and now protects clients across channels
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
For the majority of the clients that are considering any of their brand safety suitability partners, the biggest features of DV Fraud & Invalid Traffic Avoidance is that they are completely omnichannel. They are expanding incredibly across all the mediums for paid advertising. They have coverage for CTVs, social, and programmatic space as well. Retail media is their new endeavor. They also try to incorporate additional elements for responsible media. They do sustainability tracking with Scope3, at least they used to. I am not sure what the latest is on that. I know they did some attention measurement, and they probably still do because attention measurement has been a big revenue driver for them.
The fact that they contain so much functionality across multiple channels is definitely the biggest factor of winning clients for DV Fraud & Invalid Traffic Avoidance.
What needs improvement?
I would not call it too negative, not something that I see as immediate, but I have heard fairly mixed reviews when it comes down to actual reporting perspectives. When you set up things on the platform because you create the brand safety profile when you nominate the risk levels, the content categories that you need to avoid for the brand and how it performs. But when it comes down to actually being granular with which particular inventory they blocked, to what extent this inventory is violating certain rules, it sometimes gets muddy, and it is not possible to easily figure out what the reason is for a high number of blocked ads or flagged ads if they are not using blocking.
When we go to the reporting and really nitty-gritty of the outputs from DV Fraud & Invalid Traffic Avoidance, I have heard mixed reviews. However, this typically involves more complex audit processes. For the client-side teams and marketing teams within the brand side, I do not think they have those big issues with DV Fraud & Invalid Traffic Avoidance.
For how long have I used the solution?
I worked with DV Fraud & Invalid Traffic Avoidance from the beginning of 2023, when I moved into the AdTech role, and my primary responsibility was to take care of the brand safety and suitability check from the agency perspective. That is when I started being in communication with DV Fraud & Invalid Traffic Avoidance, started verifying their tool sets and implementing them for the clients.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I did see something back in the day, but it is not as frequent to be highlighted as a negative thing. It is very minor and very small.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is great. What I mentioned about omnichannel, they can easily expand across additional channels within the platform that they have. When you log in into the system that they have, you can then select additional channels. You can then set up the new tags for those channels, copy the profile that you have from programmatic into your social, into your retail media. It is very easy to scale using the self-serve option. I am assuming with the managed service, they just do it for you without any issues.
How are customer service and support?
I would say fairly good. The best kind of support that one can get is actually to speak through the dedicated reps. For the biggest scale brands, they would usually allocate a few reps that would cater for all the questions you may have. Even if the answer you are looking for is technical, they can relay the question to the specific team that can help you out with the question. That is definitely a big appreciation for me for DV Fraud & Invalid Traffic Avoidance. In terms of support, it is regular support. You contact them, you say what the issue is, they look into it, they come back to you. Nothing particularly good or bad about what they do for fixing the issues.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have been implementing for the clients IAS, Zefr, Protected Media, and a much more specialized platform for the channels. I worked personally with Pixability, with Channel Factory, with Mobian, and some other partners, but basically the whole slew of safety and suitability partners.
How was the initial setup?
They do have a platform, which is great. You can log in and train some of the brand side teams or agency teams to navigate the platform. However, the platform is a bit convoluted, or at least it may appear so at first glance. If you spend some time with their tech reps, the product teams, they will introduce you to the platform and educate you a bit. They also have DV Fraud & Invalid Traffic Avoidance university or something similar and provide courses to be educated on the platform. I think you can train yourself to be good at using the platform. But due to the sheer amount of options that are available, it can be tricky at first.
There is some friction at the beginning, and you need to spend some time educating yourself on how everything functions.
I have heard of brands working with DV Fraud & Invalid Traffic Avoidance with completely managed service perspectives. From the agency side, we need to be educated to use these platforms. From the brand side, I have heard of completely managed service perspectives where they would just say they are not going to set up anything in the platform.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
DV Fraud & Invalid Traffic Avoidance is a great omnichannel type of setup. The only closest comparison to that would be IAS, because they also have functionality to be used across multiple channels and all the attention measurement bits and the measurement across additional metrics other than just how many bad actors they managed to block. Media quality type metrics and the best performance based on attention and other proxy signals are also considered. IAS is the closest comparison to DV Fraud & Invalid Traffic Avoidance, and it is quite industry standard and industry known that those two come head to head.
When we are looking at channel specific capabilities, some of the partners would actually be a lot more specialized and a lot more attuned for the type of media activation. Channel Factory and Pixability are partners I work with, and they have a lot broader range for YouTube and TikTok activation. DV Fraud & Invalid Traffic Avoidance would provide you with reports of how they managed to flag inventory.
What other advice do I have?
DV Fraud & Invalid Traffic Avoidance pricing is quite competitive. The sales team of DV Fraud & Invalid Traffic Avoidance positions themselves as a high volume and therefore low cost offering for the clients. They usually will inquire about the potential media spend that will be from the accounts so they can offer a really good deal. I think we priced them either last year or the year before that, and they really tried to bring the price down to compare themselves with IAS. IAS quoted themselves at a bit less, so they do it on a CPM perspective mainly. IAS quoted themselves one price, and then DV Fraud & Invalid Traffic Avoidance really wanted to win the pitch, so they were happy to lower the price down. I appreciate this approach that DV Fraud & Invalid Traffic Avoidance is not quite rigid on the pricing. They really try to be adaptive on that. Knowing that they are a primary point of consideration for the big size brands, I think they have quite fair pricing. My overall rating for DV Fraud & Invalid Traffic Avoidance is 8 out of 10.
