Third Party Ad Serving – Because Third Parties Weren’t Confusing Enough – Third Party Reports

In the last 6 months or so, I have noticed a dramatic increase in the number of online advertising contracts requesting third party billing. Third-party billing occurs when the advertiser, through their agency, chooses to serve a creative from one provider, such as Eyeblaster, but wants impression reporting and billing to be based on another provider, such as DoubleClick or Atlas, which makes them third parties.

This sounds crazy at first, but it doesn’t really get any better the more you think about it, it’s still crazy.

This is accomplished in a number of different ways, basically boiling down to one of two methods. For lack of a better term, we can call them front-end and back-end. In the front-end system, the information is embedded in the third-party creative script that calls the third-party provider to register an impression. In the back-end setup, all registration is done by a back-end call from the third-party provider to the room provider, without any exposure to the creative feed.

While the front-end might be a bit easier for a publisher to manage, neither of these setups is really ideal for a few different reasons.

Let’s start with the front-end tracking. This means that there is code in the third-party creative trafficked to the publisher that will initiate the call to the third-party provider. In most cases, this code is obscured and not obvious when looking at the code. To my knowledge, only Eyewonder has an implementation that clearly shows the relative quarter tag. Even Eyewonder doesn’t seem to always use this format, but when it does, it greatly improves the publisher’s ability to establish relationship and track and bill the article correctly. Unfortunately, most front-end implementations use code that is not part of the normal reporting process and does not make the relationship clear. Even when that’s the case, front-end tracking has the advantage of locking in the relationship between third parties and fourths and avoiding the creative change issues that back-end tracking can have.

Back-end tracking accomplishes the same goal, recording a third-to-fourth impression, but does it entirely on the back-end. The third party does not embed the tracking in the creative, but instead uses a system setting to create the relationship on its own.

There are 2 big problems with this approach. First of all, there’s no way for the publisher to try to establish the relationship between third-party and third-party tracking, since the creative script doesn’t even have a clue about the details. The second challenge is that providers can change the relationship in mid-flight without notifying the publisher.

There are also the general problems of both methods. Since publishers are asked to serve a creative from one provider, but report delivery via another provider, the publisher needs the relationship to be clearly defined. However, the agencies do not seem to understand this and rarely provide documentation to help clarify this. In fact, agencies often seem not to fully understand this arrangement of their own making.

Imagine you have a VISA credit card and one day you receive a message from them saying that you now have to pay your VISA bill to a MasterCard account. However, they don’t tell you what the new account number is. When you ask them what the account number is, they don’t answer or answer but don’t give you the information, instead asking what you mean.

That’s a pretty good metaphor for how notification and deployment of third-party implementations often work. In fact, that example is not the worst case. In the worst case, agencies do not specify the relationship before the launch of the campaign and only inform the publisher weeks or months later when disputing billing.

Imagine, that in the VISA/MasterCard example above, they waited until after the fact to inform you and tell you that you had incorrectly paid your bill to the wrong account for months and told you that you should have made payments to the MasterCard account. , so they still refuse to give you the account number. Again, while this may seem like a confusing situation, it’s an accurate picture of the problem publishers are facing.

So what is the solution?

While there is no single solution to the problem, some decisions need to be made and guidelines considered so that publishers can at least feel like they have done their due diligence and prepared.

The first thing publishers should ask themselves is whether they want to accept these terms. Given the above complication, publishers may want to consider going back, or at least setting some minimum standards for how it should be handled. But the situation is complicated enough that publishers must operate from a position of conditional acceptance of its terms, not absolute obligation.

If publishers decide they’re going to accept third-party terms, and do so with some conditions, there are a few things that should be high on their list.

Since agencies create the relationships between third-party and quarter-tracking, publishers should require agencies to make that information available in a simple format. The best-case scenario would be for all third-party tracking to be embedded as a direct callout or comment in the third-party creative script, similar to the Eyewonder example above. This would have the advantage of being done once during setup and negating the need for follow-up communication. It would also be a permanent solution and even years later the follow-up relationship could be investigated. Lastly, they would have the benefit of being part of the creative setup, and as new creative assets are tracked, they would have the integrated solution.

If a one-step solution like the one above cannot be achieved, then agencies need to understand that they will need to provide publishers with some way to match third-party tracking to third-party tracking. A simple spreadsheet would suffice, but it’s still not as good a solution as the integrated solution above, as that information will need to be communicated and managed throughout the life of the campaign and for some time afterward.

Agencies must not only provide the key to establishing relationships, but they must do so in a timely manner. How do you define opportune? Before the location is released, as disclosing the relationship afterwards can severely limit the ability to pace and control delivery.

Third party tracking and billing of online advertising is complicated and requires the industry to address that complication or resign itself to living with it. Ignoring problems won’t make them go away, and while the upcoming IAB exchange may resolve some issues, it certainly won’t be a silver bullet for third-party ad tracking.