“The simple solution to ad-funded piracy” – Silver Bullet’s Umberto Torrielli tells us how the agency’s new platform is combating cybercrime in the digital marketing space by partnering with White Bullet

With global ad fraud predicted to exceed $50bn by 2025, we speak to Umberto Torrielli from data and digital solutions agency Silver Bullet to get an insight into the groundbreaking platform it has developed to combat ad-funded piracy, with the help of IP infringement and advertising data business White Bullet.

Hi Umberto, thanks for joining us today. Your new platform sounds almost too good to be true in terms of its ability to protect marketers from digital ad piracy. Can you tell us what it offers your clients?

What we’ve built at Silver Bullet is a platform called 4D. This operates in both the pre- and post-bid side of the programmatic equation, with the aim of protecting advertisers’ dollars from funding cybercrime. For the uninitiated, this programmatic equation automatically manages the process by which an advertiser can buy or win an ad slot on a website. Our platform, which is designed as an evolution of contextual targeting, goes to work before a bid is even made, layering in White Bullet’s data to recognise websites engaged in piracy, and blocking an advertiser’s bidding process before it has even begun. This means brands never have to worry about their ads running on a pirate site.

Are you able to get into the details of exactly how 4D protects advertisers?

Well, it’s remarkably easy to combat this kind of cybercrime with 4D, and there are two ways of doing it. The first method is to create a context for your campaign that leverages White Bullet data and blocks the bidding process for suspect sites before it has even begun, as I've just mentioned.

The second workflow is to deploy a 4D analytics tag into a current media campaign. Having access to White Bullet’s technology and data means 4D can analyse campaigns that are running in real time to protect ads that are already live. It does this by using the aforementioned tech and data to recognise if impressions are being deployed on pirate sites, and subsequently gives you the option to stop that happening, all in real time.

For a marketer, how easy is it to use 4D to protect campaigns, from a functionality and UX perspective?

Even though the technology involved is extremely advanced, 4D makes harnessing its power extremely easy. In the platform, you:

1. Simply create a new, highly sophisticated context for your ads, and prior to deploying the campaign you simply select the White Bullet option in 4D’s interface,

2. Then you choose the ‘low risk’ tick box. What you have done is stopped your adverts appearing on ‘high risk’ or pirated websites, all before even making a bid. It’s that simple, and it’s all in real time.

3. Once the White Bullet feature is activated, and the context is associated with your media campaign, we analyse in real time all requests that come through the DSP, and use data provided by White Bullet to reject bids from websites we believe have a propensity toward piracy, keeping your ads safe.

As I mentioned earlier, we can also analyse and protect campaigns that are already up and running. We do this by analysing each campaign’s impressions in real time, then show you through 4D’s interface the distribution of these impressions based on the signals that we receive from White Bullet’s data. The platform alerts you to the percentage of impressions that have been delivered to high-risk sites, where there is potential for funding piracy. From there you, can activate White Bullet’s feature at the click of a button, and protect your campaigns going forward.

Why does 4D/Silverbullet see this as a problem that needs solving? Are you getting pressure from your customers to act, or is it a new area of opportunity – a fresh USP?

The reality is it’s a combination of both. However, with 4D our desire is to drive marketing forward in a moral and ethical way, and I think as an industry - and I’m guilty of this myself - we have all been complacent on certain issues. We know third-party cookies will disappear at some stage and privacy protection will become more stringent. Consumers are increasingly interested in ensuring that their privacy is respected and that their consent is required and serviced. It is on this basis that we have developed 4D, to address the privacy-first, cookieless future that is in the process of presenting itself.

It sounds like you’ve ensured 4D is future-proofed, but what challenges do you expect for both the platform and industry?

Ultimately, we have looked to build a platform that plays towards servicing moral, ethical marketers. It leverages smart, new, compliant signals rather than identifiers - and piracy happens to be part of the issue that needs addressing with our holistic approach. We hope that in 4D we have a marketplace for the future, one that thrives on contextual signals, rather than data that is tied to ID or consent. It’s about ensuring brands are seen in safe environments at appropriate times to produce a cleaner, safer and better-performing ecosystem for everyone.

And finally, aside from the fact that brands don’t want their money funding piracy, there's the simple fact that ads which end up on these websites are not performing; they are never seen and are, therefore, a waste of money. Our aim is to ensure money is invested into slots that merit the dollars, and that’s better for everyone: advertisers are not wasting money, the campaigns perform better and, ultimately, it’s a win-win for all those in the chain.

One final question for you: how have publishers received the 4D platform? What’s their stake in supporting initiatives like this?

Well, publishers certainly have a difficulty with the traditional ways their content is rated for problematic content, because those systems are often ruled by blocklists and content can be blocked just by the presence of a particular word or subject. And publishers who fall foul of those filters can lose advertising revenue as a result. What our system does is to filter out high-risk content at the point of supply, so what we say to publishers is: we would love for you to offer our solution up to the advertisers you deal with. And by working with you, we can ensure that you don’t, as a publisher, end up on a blocklist, and we can all focus our energies on rooting out the real bad apples.

Also published in: The Drum

Podcasts powered by AudioHarvest