Does Your Advertising Company Have a Compliance Department?

5 Reasons Why It Should

 By Monique Muro
AdSupply, Inc.

The word ‘compliance’ never makes anyone feel good. It brings to mind men in suitcases, coming around to check your systems and point out errors when things are already running pretty smooth.

But compliance for certain industries is very important for the future. The FDA, for instance. You wouldn’t want to put anything in your body that wasn’t tested for compliance, would you?

Sometimes we have to apply things like compliance to the ad industry, to make sure buyers are playing nicely with sellers. The ad industry can be a pretty volatile place, and without some type of quality check, things can get a little chaotic.

AdSupply is rare in that it has an entire department dedicated to reviewing ads for approval, scanning them for malware, and monitoring creative for deceptive practices.

This is a great way to make publishers feel secure. It makes them feel like they’re getting not only an additional revenue stream with AdSupply’s ads, but an extra level of protection against malware, tech support scams, and false advertising.

Here are 5 solid reasons your ad network should start employing a team dedicated to monitoring the ads running on your network:

1) It makes a great selling point.

What better way to sell publishers on running your ads than by educating them on how serious your company is about displaying quality ads?

Publishers want to know that their sites aren’t going to be overrun with deceptive or scammy ads. This sort of advertising is a major turn-off for publishers when they’re scouting ad networks and it’s a great way to sell them on using your network over all the others.

2) It ensures your publishers are safe, but your advertisers too.

Advertisers face similar problems. They want to know that your traffic is real, and that their ads aren’t displaying on sites unrelated to their audience.

AdSupply has a compliance process for both advertisers and publishers. We routinely pull reports and use quality tools on a weekly basis to determine that traffic is real, and that ads are viewable and displaying on the sites they should be.

3 ) It allows you to catch scammers in advance, before they completely infect all of your publishers and ruin your reputation.

Without a compliance department, efforts to convince a publisher to stay on board after one of your ads has infected their computer (or their users’ computers) with malware are futile. Too little, too late.

Having a compliance department allows your team to monitor live ads on the network hourly, routinely testing them in different geos and devices to ensure all ads are displaying as they should, and that nothing has been switched out to a scammy surprise for your publishers.

One bad experience from a top publisher can definitely ruin your reputation as an ad network. Better to avoid it altogether.

4) It saves you money in lawsuits you might have to deal with for running ads that could be infringing copyright.

You’ve seen the popular advertorials lately, haven’t you? The ones with Dr. Oz, Megan Kelly, and Angelina Jolie, allegedly touting products they would never in a million years promote?

You might have actually been duped into reading one yourself, thinking it was a real article. While non-branded/non-trademarked advertorials are compliant on the AdSupply network, some of the more deceptive native ads have come under fire recently for the misuse of trademark brands and intellectual property.

Entangling yourself in a legal nightmare is the last thing you want to deal with when trying to run a business. Get your compliance team to make sure your ads are compliant, and you won’t have to worry about the FTC coming after you.

5) A solid compliance procedure tells everyone you are a team player.

Having a dedicated compliance team ensures that we are always using best practices in the industry when it comes to our ad sizes, display, and viewability. AdSupply prides itself on making sure our ads are IAB compliant.

Talking about being compliant in the ad industry is one thing, but actually having a dedicated team using sophisticated tools to monitor malware and ad cloaking can establish your ad network as a top competitor, and one to be taken seriously.

A word of advice when assembling your stellar compliance team: create useful industry guidelines for them to follow, educate them on best practices (and malpractices) from advertisers and publishers, and train them to be suspicious of everything. We’ve come a long way, but it’s still the wild west out there.