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.

As we are developing Media Guard and figuring out how to make things work best, we have realized that we need to come up with names for all of the different parts we are developing. Yes, it seems obvious and incredibly simple but has taken more effort than I realized it would.

We talk about so many of these small moving parts of the system, often developing ideas as we discuss, that it has been difficult to stop and name each of them as come up with an idea – who knows if it will change. So far we have just described each of them while we talk - “you know the part with the human audit, the results that come from that� - but that gets quite confusing after a while, “wait you mean the tags the publisher would set or the parts that Media Guard would set?�

Now, however, we have started to create a more solid form to Media guard and to become more certain about what features it will have, and as such, there are certain concepts that we can start naming – in fact we really need to. Especially, as we have started to map out what changes will be made to internal user interfaces and future changes to YM interfaces, we really need to come up with names for some of these ideas.

So we have started on the process, but at times I feel like some OCD bureaucrat in discussion. Should something be called a “standard� or a “spec� or a “profile� and what do the nuances imply? Is it an “attribute� or a “classification�? Do we define the focus as on publishers, networks, or site-related?

One big struggle we have been having is about using the term “audit.� For the first part of Media Guard, which we are calling Media Guard – Creative Reviewer for now (MG-CR) we have a two-step process, the automated review of a creative for the Technical Attributes and then, if a creative “passes� that first part, i.e. it doesn’t have any “bad� things like Active X or viruses, then it gets sent to our human auditing team to review and classify the Content Attributes. The good news is that we are comfortable with the terms Technical Attributes and Content Attributes and are starting to use those consistently. However, that is but the tip of the iceberg.

For now we have been saying that once a creative “passes� based on technical attributes it is then “auditable� and then has a human audit. But are those terms ok? Is it too pejorative to say that a creative “passes� a review? Would we upset too many advertisers if their creatives were to not “pass� our technical review and be termed “unaudited� – especially in light of the fact that rotating 3^rd-party tags will all be “unauditable� (see next post for more detail.) Or would publishers like this strong language, that we are “auditing� – conjuring up images of a stringent IRS audit that reveals everything?

At this point, we are not sure what the reaction will be to this term and for now we are using it, because it is what we have been using and it is very effective at conveying the concept. We will just have wait and see what others think about it. But for the time being we are able to start to communicate with each other using a lot fewer confusing descriptions – until next week, at least!

Sorry for posting one day late.

We didn’t move into production yet as hardware for the SOAP server was not ready. Hopefully this problem is fixed this week.

Main priority this week:

• fix all bugs found by Netblue
• work on documentation - more usage examples
• update billing status API for networks

These are the publishers we want to serve.  Let’s keep building what they need.

In this version we’ve fixed several WSDL problems. First of all some
toolkits (gSOAP) didn’t like that each WSDL file had different set of
custom types - this was fixed by putting them into a single XSD file
included from all WSDLs. Also now WSDL correctly declares optional
fields in custom types.

Several bugs reported by Netblue were fixed. Most notorious problem
which were fixed is that objects were not visible after creation.

More topics were covered in SOAP API docs. Check out examples
section.

All available WSDLs are at:

• http://ct.yieldmanager.com/ilyaphp/manage/soap-0.09/campaign.php?wsdl
• http://ct.yieldmanager.com/ilyaphp/manage/soap-0.09/contact.php?wsdl
• http://ct.yieldmanager.com/ilyaphp/manage/soap-0.09/creative.php?wsdl
• http://ct.yieldmanager.com/ilyaphp/manage/soap-0.09/delivery_rules.php?wsdl
• http://ct.yieldmanager.com/ilyaphp/manage/soap-0.09/insertion_order.php?wsdl
• http://ct.yieldmanager.com/ilyaphp/manage/soap-0.09/line_item.php?wsdl
• http://ct.yieldmanager.com/ilyaphp/manage/soap-0.09/publisher.php?wsdl
• http://ct.yieldmanager.com/ilyaphp/manage/soap-0.09/section.php?wsdl
• http://ct.yieldmanager.com/ilyaphp/manage/soap-0.09/site.php?wsdl
• http://ct.yieldmanager.com/ilyaphp/manage/soap-0.09/target_profile.php?wsdl