Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Friday, July 23, 2010

Questions to ask verification providers

A prospective partner recently asked me to provide some questions he should consider when evaluating partners in the verification space. Here's the response our team came up with.

- Immediacy of actionable information (avoid make goods by having actionable information 24 hours after campaign launch)
- Implementation process (does the process create more risk for errors in the campaign, or is it seamlessly integrated with major ad servers?)
- Technology solution (does the solution create a 3rd or 4th party ad call, in other words does it potentially disrupt the ad delivery or create metric discrepancies?)
- Integration with existing reporting solutions (Does the company have a “black box” or can the data be pulled via API into existing reporting solutions?)
- False positives (What is the company’s methodology in regard to reporting and managing against false positives on brand safety?)
- Ecosystem solution or vertical solution? (Does the technology solution focus on providing the entire ecosystem a means of measuring and managing brand safety with regard to business rules, who owns what data and how do data owners protect their business relationships while still providing transparency?)
- Data practices and privacy (has the company undergone a 3rd party audit?)
- Proactive versus reactive (Is the company focused on clawing back money or avoiding make good situations all together?)
- Semantic/categorization/content/context engine (what exactly is the tech behind the brand safety service? Who provides it?)

Obviously we feel we have solid answers for all of these. But they're fair game to ask anyone and good grounds for comparison. Am I missing anything?