Cleaning up the digital ad supply chain is now the rallying cry for most of the digital media industry, with publishers, brands, agencies and ad tech vendors all piling in.
That drive toward transparency has made the somewhat dryly named ads.txt a hot topic in media. Momentum behind ads.txt adoption is increasing, with 44 percent of publishers that run digital advertising implementing it by the end of October.
But ads.txt is not bulletproof against ad fraud. Human errors like misspelling supply-side platform names in ads.txt files have wrongly penalized exchanges from having their inventory being picked up. Plus, most ads.txt files don’t specify the type of inventory — display, video or native — a vendor is allowed to sell. That means display inventory can still be repackaged as video, for example, to boost CPMs.
These issues have given rise to a new awkwardly named upgrade: ads.cert. Here’s an explainer.
Read the whole article here: WTF is ads.cert?
Source: Digiday
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