Since early 2006, we’ve been monitoring and testing every creative trafficked into the exchange. Our automated Creative Tester (CT) identifies malicious activity, such as viruses, ActiveX downloads and other high risk activities, on creative load. In January, we started emailing advertisers ‘CT Violation Report’ emails informing them of the infractions for each creative.

In efforts to make the Exchange a safer place in 2007, we’re rolling out Phase 1 of Media Guard. Publishers and networks can now ban any unwanted tags on both the universal targeting and line item levels. We’re rolling this out with ActiveX, viruses, and program installs banned for all publishers and networks on the universal targeting level. This is going into the beta release today and will be available in prod in 2 weeks.

Any creative tagged with a CT violation will remain tagged for 7 days. This safeguards publishers while allowing advertisers to work with their partners to clean up the creatives. If the creative continues to exhibit malicious behavior, the 7 days will reset with each infraction.

As most of you know, we have also been human auditing creatives. Currently, all image/Flash files and Atlas redirects are being audited. We recently began to audit third party tags with a single creative behind it. Once we work through this backlog, we will add third party tags that rotate multiple creatives of a single offer type. The auditing team is working hard to make this happen as quickly and accurately as possible. Once that’s done, we’ll release Media Guard fully into production. Stay tuned for more updates.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Right Media Exchange, 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.