Programmatic advertising is a revolving door of new threats, recycled old threats and bad actors. It’s been that way for a long time and we want to put a stop to it.

Today, we launched a major upgrade to the Ad Lightning platform: A powerful new suite of ad blocking tools for publishers. Finally, publishers will have the control they’ve been looking for to completely prevent malicious, offensive and poor-quality ad units from loading on their sites. It's time for publishers to take the lead, inject their own brand of transparency, their own definition of control and determine which ads and partners measure up, on their terms.

In a recent survey of over 100 top publishers, most said programmatic partners and industry organizations don’t do nearly enough to address these issues, so it’s not surprising that the vast majority, 73%, said they’re most bullish on new technology solutions that will give them the power to block programmatic ads on their own terms.

In order for publishers to take full control of their advertising, they need a true long-term ad blocking strategy enabled by a solution set that meet five core requirements:

1. Address ad quality issues proactively
2. Block ads comprehensively
3. Eliminate bad ads cost-effectively
4. Provide centralized control and transparency,
5. Integrate seamlessly into existing core ad tech

Proactive:

Proactivity is an important aspect of a sound ad blocking strategy. Whenever possible, unwanted ads should be blocked before they load on the page. In addition, ad quality insights should be available to Exchanges and Platforms, so they can resolve issues further upstream and perform pre-flight testing to ensure creative meets guidelines for compliance, content and security before going live.

Comprehensive:

Blocking strategies need to protect the publisher comprehensively against all advertising threats. Whether ads are redirecting audiences, introducing malware, slowing page loads or stealing data, the bad ones should be addressed with one solution that scales across the board. Solutions should provide insight into where the bad ads are coming from, as well as the good ads, allowing for quick optimization of inventory partnerships and maximized renvue.

Cost-Effective:

Your ad management solutions should enable you to improve both your revenue and margins, and those contributions to your business should be clear. The more complex the patchwork of tools, the more difficult it is to see how they’re helping your bottom line. When you eliminate the patchwork of narrow solutions in favor of a more comprehensive approach, your tech stack becomes more manageable and should cost less for both the short- and long-term.

Centralized Control and Transparency:

Publishers need technology solutions that protect the good ads (and the contribution those good ads make to ROI) while providing the flexibility to target bad ads based on publisher-defined ad quality definitions and thresholds. That type of precision is only possible if you have the details at hand to understand which ads have issues, the type and severity of those issues, how they affect your site, and the source of each bad ad. Armed with that level of transparency and an equally robust set of controls, you can take immediate, targeted, yet scalable action.

Seamless Integration:

Your ad blocking solutions should be compatible, and integrate easily, with your other core ad technologies (DFP, Pre-bid solutions, etc.). If pieces don’t work together, it’s difficult to get started, automate ad blocking rules or get a handle on the impact of your ad blocking efforts.

Ad Lightning's Blocking Wrapper

With today's launch, we’ve introduced an ad blocking solution that fulfills all five of those core requirements. We've taken our advanced ad scanning technology Site Scanning is the first critical component of a successful blocking strategy. By running Site Scans we’re able to collect the HTML as well as all the Javascript responses for each resource within an ad call. This lets us see the source of the bad ad behavior and acurately identify the malicious “signature”. This methodology helps prevent false positives and eliminates broad classifications of domains as malicious.

Some ad blocking highlights of the new launch:

The new Ad Lightning Blocking Wrapper stops bad ads from loading with a two-phased approach: First a check to block known threats, followed by an enterprise sandbox application that blocks new and unknown redirect offenders. The new tech seamlessly integrates within your existing ad environment to watch every ad impression & proactively block ads across a more comprehensive list of threats.

The wrapper disables the ad's malicious behaviors and supports a broader set of publisher scenarios than other blocking solutions, minimizes latency and allows you to whitelist providers or ads you’d like the Wrapper to ignore.

Our blocklist covers malware (redirects, maliciously formatted ads and bad domains) and a broad range of other issues that negatively affect customer experience, result in data leakage or violate quality standards. You can easily customize your own blocklist to match blocking parameters to your own key quality issues and unique operating environment.

The Ad Lightning Insights Dashboard now includes reporting that combines both scanning and blocking insights. It’s a refreshing, revealing level of transparency that finally brings publisher-centricity to publisher-side ad blocking. Reports are updated in real time and include details on each type of threat, the source, and the number of times it was blocked.

Try it!

At Ad Lightning, we’re dead set on bringing transparency and control to the chaotic world of programmatic advertising for publishers and ad exchanges. Want to see what real transparency and control look like? Try the enhanced Ad Lightning platform for free. Just drop us a note for a free 30-day trial: info@adlightning.com.

More information on the upgraded version of Ad Lightning is available at https://www.adlightning.com/product.