One of the serious discussions we’ve had here centered on ‘what can we audit’ or the ‘auditableness’ of a creative. (See the previous post for a discussion of what this means.) The first major issue was whether or not we will audit rotating 3rd party tags. We have no control over these creatives and the advertising network can rotate in different creatives at any point and hence we did not feel that it would be possible to classify their content, since it will always be changing. We may revisit this issue over time to see if it might be possible to somehow manage these problems, but for now we will not send these creatives to the full human review and as such they will not Media Guard classified. The second decision we made was to exclude certain ’sketchy’ behavior of creatives. Specifically for a creative to be auditable none of the following Technical Attributes can be found in the creative during the Automated Review:

• Not open any extra windows. For banners this simply means that they cannot open any sort of popup window. For popups this will exclude both exit pops and popups that launch additional popups.
• The creative may not initiate an Active X download.
• If any file loaded by the creative contains a virus it will also not be eligible.
• The creative may not display multiple advertisements, or automatically rotate multiple advertisements in one placement.

All creatives will be classified according to these Technical Attributes and publishers who only want Media Guard Classified content will never see any creatives with any of the above Technical Attributes. Creatives will not be banned for what their ads look like, but we will be aggressively classifying any and all questionable material. As always, please feel free to leave feedback here on the Media Guard blog.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 14th, 2006 at 4:10 pm and is filed under Media Guard. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.