Trust & Safety

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Ensuring the safety of end users and peace of mind for advertisers and publishers is of paramount importance for Marlinads.

As the number of mobile applications and spending on advertising grows, unfortunately so does fraud. Not only is fraud constantly evolving, but online fraudsters are also always changing their tactics to trick their clients in order to get some benefits.

As a trusted partner to leading brands and publishers across the globe for the last couple of years, Marlinads has established processes and checks on our supply-side platform (SSP) and exchange to ensure brand safety and a fraud-free experience.

The term "Brand Safety" describes the controls that companies in the digital advertising supply chain employ to protect the reputation of brands when their ads appear next to illegal content, which may lead to a related loss of return on investment.

A great deal of content online today is not curated and this is brand unsuitable. Marlinads adheres to the Brand Safety floor defined by the 4A's with IAB, and we have a zero-tolerance policy regarding brand safety and Invalid activities. The below set of categories (Images/Video/Audio/Text) are considered as high risk:

• Adult and explicit sexual content
• Arms and ammunition
• Death or injury
• Online piracy
• Hate speech and acts of aggression
• Sensitive social issue or violation of human rights
• Spam or harmful content

Mobile Web:

In the past decade, the usage of mobile devices has increased, with that the customers' focus on mobile advertising and content has also increased. Mobile web simply mean web browser services accessed from mobile devices.

Consumers spend less time on mobile web compared to apps. However, there are a lot more mobile websites that have large followings and do not have their own mobile apps.

The fraud on mobile advertising has drastically increased with the usage. The main objective of the fraudster is to steal from advertiser and publishers. Not only does it drain revenue, but it also causes damage to workflow and data, ruining potential strategies before they've even begun.

At Marlinads, every publisher is exhaustively reviewed before they are onboarded. Once the publisher is onboarded, the site registered is tested to ensure they follow and adhere to Marlinads content policy.

Connected TV and Over-the-Top (OTT) Video

The majority of internet users now watch videos online each month. Most of this is consumed on OTT apps on mobile devices and through Connected TV. Fraud is not new to the OTT space, although the rise of OTT apps has put SSPs under pressure to determine what content is truly premium.

While Marlinads requires its demand partners to ensure that the content shared adheres to our content guidelines, Marlinads also has a stringent vetting process for CTV/OTT supply partners and endeavors to reduce any non-compliance. We adhere to MRC, IAB and TAG guidelines to ensure transparency and safety for all our demand partners. All apps are reviewed to check if they are COPPA compliant

Protecting Advertisers and Publishers from Invalid Activities

Measures to Protect Publishers:

Marlinads requires its demand partners to restrict any advertisements that are offensive, deceptive, or misleading, contain spam and/or promote illegal products or services. We have a zero-tolerance policy for advertisers who do not comply with our ad quality guidelines.

We monitor and screen all ads through multiple ad quality (AQ) processes to ensure that only good quality ads are rendered on our supply. We have a comprehensive AQ response protocol where every demand partner and their ads are reviewed. If they are found to have sent brand unsafe/bad ads, they are immediately removed and suspended from our systems. 

Marlinads's review process runs numerous back-end checks, including:

• Buyer Verification: Buyer email ID, contact number and address are verified to make sure it's a valid buyer. IAB taxonomy is followed to categorize the creative. 
• Programmatic Supply Preference: Marlinads supports various kinds of supply filtering controls based on the buyer's preferences (client-specific safety filtering). We also honor all queries per second (QPS) limitations set by the buyer.
• Fraud Profiling: Our internal ad screening tools identify threats by verifying the domains in real time and block any ad with a known issue.

Measures to Protect Advertisers:

Ad fraud is type of scam which deceives advertisers into paying for something worthless such as fake traffic or even leads generated by bots. Ad fraud provides misaligned incentives, which open the door to a tremendous amount of fraudulent online activities whether it's by non-human or human traffic.

To protect advertisers from such invalid activities, Marlinads implements strict policies and processes when onboarding publishers, including:

• Seller Verification: Publisher properties undergo thorough evaluation, including ownership verification. Apps and sites are categorized, and ads.txt is mandated for mobile web and app-ads.txt for in-app supply. Additionally, all publishers must comply with guidelines established by the Media Rating Council (MRC) around invalid traffic (IVT) and viewability.
  • For CTV/ OTT, multiple entries have the ownership to send ad request, and they are called 'inventory sharing'. It can be app owner /content creator / distributor. The in-app owner ads.txt file, along with distributor information, the relationship and authorized seller and reseller information needs to be added.
  • If a participating company acting as a indirect seller/Intermediary must honor a Direct Seller’s app/ads.txt file if one has been published, buying only from entities identified within the published ads.txt file. If that company is transacting with in-app inventory, it must also honor a Direct Seller’s app-ads.txt file if one has been published, buying only from entities identified within the published app-ads.txt file.
  • If the Reseller / intermediary publisher is TAG registered it is mandated to pass payment id chain in requests.
  • More information on ads.txt is available via the IAB at - https://iabtechlab.com/ads-txt/, and publishers registered with us could also write to support@marlinads.com to have their questions related to ads.txt and app-ads.txt answered.
• Ad Adjacency: All publishers using the Marlinads platform are required to adhere to Marlinads content guidelines, and apps with a significant user base and request volume are reviewed at regular intervals to screen for any ad adjacency or ad experience issues.
• Invalid Traffic Filtering: Extensive technical checks ensure ads are rendered on the registered and verified publisher property. All unregistered bundle IDs are immediately blocked, and the responsible publisher is deactivated.
• Viewability Verification: We work with an MRC-accredited viewability measurement company. This partnership and our internal controls ensure that the ad is contained in the viewable space of the app based on pre-established criteria as per the campaign's set-up

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