The Association of Online Publishers (AOP) has today issued an open letter to advertisers and ad agencies calling for an end to publisher intellectual property (IP) theft, whereby ad tech vendors excessively scrape metadata from publishers’ websites. The AOP says this practice, when done without publishers’ consent, amounts to a theft of publishers’ IP, putting publishers’ sustainability at risk.
The AOP specifically called out content verification vendors, which have privileged access to publishers’ web page data in order to verify ad placement and quality to buyers. Publishers have specifically made this data available to these vendors, in order to demonstrate media quality to the buy-side.
But the AOP says some of these vendors have begun adding in unseen extra tags into authorised in-header wrappers, or running bots to crawl open publisher domains, scraping more extensive meta data and article text. They’re then using this data to build out contextual audience segments which they then monetise themselves – without the permission of the publishers they work with.
“For publishers, this action erodes and undermines their exclusive capacity to enrich user experiences and ad inventory using owned data,” said Richard Reeves, managing director of the AOP, in the open letter. “Meanwhile, buyers face significant data validity concerns. There are no guarantees that data used to verify media and serve contextual ads to specific audience segments is licensed, or accurate. Buyers need to ask themselves some tough questions around whether the data fuelling their ad campaigns is of sufficient quality, integrity, and legitimacy.”
The impending death of the third-party cookie is pushing more emphasis on contextual targeting, and bolstering publishers’ ability to increase the value of their ad inventory through first-party data. But these tactics from verification vendors means that publishers’ are unknowingly losing control of their own contextual data, undermining their own monetisation efforts.
A call to action from the buy-side
While advertisers and agencies aren’t the ones using this tactic, Reeves says they may have more responsibility than they realise. “Some verification providers indicate that publisher IP is only collected at the buyer’s request, essentially attributing blame towards the advertisers themselves,” he said in the open letter.
Thus, the AOP is calling for advertisers and agencies to use their power to protect publishers, by boycotting vendors which can’t prove that their contextual data has been collected fairly, and with consent.
In the meantime, the AOP has worked with the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) to release an updated version of its Brand Safety Certification, which sets out clearer definitions around publisher data applications, differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate data use.
