That’s where bad — in some cases, very bad — contextual adjacencies abound and opportunity for improvement lies within reach.

Most marketers and their agencies understand and accept the tradeoffs around re-targeting that led to examples shown in the article. After all, they see the direct ROI in this approach across millions of impressions, not just a few page level examples like those shown that are, well, taken out of context in the overall campaign.

While the agency brand manager would not be running down the hall to show these screenshots to her boss, she may do so with the campaign results, knowing that despite marginal contextual relevance, the conversion results were positive.

The bigger problem arises from the large percentage – in fact the majority – of display ads that are not audience-targeted. Even within the bounds of what verification companies deem acceptable, a huge amount of display ads are still served without regard to content/contextual adjacencies. Like Peer39, uKnow employees see a wide range of sites in the course of their work and found the following examples that would, at a minimum, be highly disappointing to the brand managers involved.

After regaining their composure, the brand or agency executive might be tempted to stop using intermediaries. But networks, DSPs and trading desks provide tremendous value and efficiency in the execution of media campaigns. A better solution would be to give those partners specific guidelines or directions around the non-audience based portion of the campaigns.

Why not use tools available in the market to better plan, target and optimize this portion of the buy, even when directing budget towards intermediary channels? And if you are a network, DSP or trading desk, why not employ solutions that help you optimize contextual relevance for each campaign?

Because most brands, products and services are unique, creating custom semantic channels for each campaign that carve out optimal placements within each body of inventory you access makes complete sense. Inventory supply vastly outstrips demand, so why would you ever allow your ads to be placed on irrelevant or inappropriate content adjacencies? Sadly, spray and pray is still widely seen.

Given the success of audience-based targeting and the plethora of data services that have arisen, a disproportionate amount of time is spent in this area. Equal focus should be given to proactively targeting that content which is most appropriate to each brand’s sensibilities and to its ROI objectives.

Using context as a proxy for audience is a long-standing tool, and given the Do-Not-Track initiatives underway and advent of better browser-based tracking controls, employing strategies and tools that provide better contextual planning, transparency and control – while maintaining scale – are essential.

So while Ellenthal’s points have merit, they miss the bigger problem and in it, the opportunity for agencies/brands and their distribution partners. Protect the brand and increase ROI by creating custom semantic channels for the non-audience portion of each campaign.

And the spend is going more places — 43% of respondent said they work with at least five different ad networks compared to 30% who said the same two years ago. Thirty-four percent said they buy media from between five and 10 networks, while 46% said they were going to more networks than last year.

More than a thousand online advertising pros were queried about their display practices, but the report is particularly focused on results from 400 (presumably important) advertisers and agencies. The meatiest bits?

• 68% of media buyers in the U.S. and 57% of those in Europe said they had increased their display spend during the last year, with about a quarter commenting that they had shifted some of their search budgets into display.

• 23% of respondents (39% in the U.S.) said they use at least one DSP, with 82% of that group saying they use more than one — 15% were utter whores, working more than four at the same time. For buyers using DSPs, that channel takes up an average of 32% of the media plan.

• Improved targeting was seen as a key benefit of working with a DSP by 64%, followed by real time campaign insights (60%) and impression-level bidding (53%). Lack of available inventory and service were cited as challenges by 54% and 51% of respondents, respectively.

• 34% of agency trading desk spend goes through RTB (41% in US and 34% in Europe), but 37% of the respondents said their trading desks throw less than 20% of media spend at RTB. Interestingly, 17% of advertisers and agencies didn’t allocate any display advertising budget to trading desks.

Plenty of publishers and platform companies are likely to disagree with that statement. Among the verification companies, DoubleVerify receives the lion’s share of bile, with network executives complaining about the company employing strong-arm tactics and overselling the capabilities of its technology. However, the proliferation of verification tools across the demand side and into the platforms suggest plenty of media buyers out there consider verification a buddy.

“We’re seeing verification on every impression,” says CEO and founder Oren Netzer. “We see the opportunity two or three years down the road to be the third-party for campaign measurement and accountability in the industry  – a Nielsen for online, if you will.”

The acquisitions of two ad verification companies — AdXpose and Adometry — by companies with other core competencies has encouraged whether verification can stand alone as a service. However, DV, as well as competitor AdSafe Media, see verification as moving well beyond its roots in brand protection.

Arguably the biggest player in the field with a reported 40 billion verified impressions a month, DV is adding capabilities over the next few years to make the company’s solutions the standard and centralized tools for ensuring online accountability and measuring campaign performance.

To help make that vision a reality, DV recently scored $33 million in a Series C round led by later-stage investors JMI Equity and Institutional Venture Partners. Just like last year’s $10 million Series B round, DoubleVerify wasn’t actively looking for cash, but intense investor interest in the company signaled to Netzer and crew it was time to get grander plans rolling through a funding injection.

Netzer’s vision for verification’s future is about helping clients produce better ROI through lowering IO noncompliance rates – this equals less wasted impressions and more spend funneled toward target audiences, he argues. (DV also provides audience verification services.) Of DV’s 200 Fortune 500 advertising clients that use verification across the board, IO noncompliance rates with existing customers is down to a few percent.

“We’ve seen campaigns where noncompliance has fallen from 40% to 2%-3%,” he says. “Imagine 37% of the budget of the campaign that was wasted before heading back to the advertiser. Measure that against the cost of using verification, and there’s your ROI.”

In addition to measuring noncompliance, DV also tracks clicks and conversions — and all its data and metrics shared by clients suggests verification improves all three metrics.

On the other hand, the initial percentage of IO noncompliance for new clients keeps increasing, Netzer says — 31% currently vs. 20% a year before. “Because more and more advertisers are verifying, the ones who aren’t are stuck with the bad inventory no one wants,” he says.

Judging Noncompliance

Easiest definition of noncompliance: ads delivered to the wrong destinations. This covers brand protection — e.g., keeping family company advertising off of porn sites or social forums devoted to hate groups – which was the initial selling point for many verification services. In addition, DV still has a big business in battling fraudulent impressions with its Fraud Detection Lab. Fraudulent impressions include tricks like invisible ads (iFrames sized 0 X 0), stacked ads (iFrames again!), ad clutter (hundreds of ads on a page), etc.

DV does play the old game of white list/black list sites, but these lists are provided by advertisers and DV verifies according to company orders. A great deal of verification services are based on the 80 categories and four tiers DV uses to classify the 1 million sites it crawls daily.

The tiers:

Premium: Highly desirable content that is safe for all brands. Premium content, such as technology or lifestyle, may appeal to preferred demographics or command a high CPM.

Acceptable: Content that may be appropriate but may not appeal to conservative brands. This content may include matchmaking, user-generated or political material.

Restricted: High-severity content that most brands would consider inappropriate (some “softcore” pornography falls under this category).

Unacceptable: Extremely problematic or negative content such as pornography, fraud and illegal downloads.

Of course, DV has a process for dealing with complaints that a site has been unfairly squeezed into one of these tiers — there all always “false positives,” but the amount is minimal, Netzer claims.

“Many times they’re wrong, but sometimes they’re right and we fix the classification,” he says.

One of the biggest issues is mixed-content/media sites. Netzer cites BoxingScene.com — it may seem like a site about boxing, a great deal of the site’s traffic is driven by the user-generated content section — which happens to be full of uploaded hardcore porn. (Just to be clear, two men beating the hell out of each other is not considered porn to most people.) Netzer guesses BoxingScene doesn’t care as the UCG segment drives so much traffic, but advertisers certainly do.

“We crawl all the pages of a site, and if we find enough pages with pornography on them, we’ll classify the site as porn,” he says. “You can’t blame the ad network for not knowing — it’s our job to find out.”

On the Platforms

See, DoubleVerify doesn’t believe verification is just an advertiser thing — the platform business is one of largest growing segments. Numerous DSPs, exchanges and networks are integrating DV’s real-time API and using Navigator, its sell-side suite of solutions.

It’s easy for ad networks and exchanges to get burned by unsavory publishers, which is why DV’s site classification system can be used for prospecting publishers as well as network hygiene. DV’s Illuminator reports give data on classification as well as the number of ad units on the page (and those above and below the fold). Networks can cross-reference DV’s database to get the lowdown on publishers that want to join and check to make sure the current roster passes muster.

In addition, the tag monitoring service is pretty literal — it allows networks to see all the sites where their ad tags are running, including the ones the network may not be aware of. For example, one network client boasted a list of 8,000 publishers, but when DV turned on tag monitoring, network tags appeared on more than 100,000 sites.

Tag-jacking — typically when a site owner slaps the ad network tag for an approved site onto other owned sites (think porn) — is rampant and easy to conceal with iFrames. So networks unintentionally serve ads on unintended (and perhaps inappropriate) sites and potentially lose advertisers because they’ve been bamboozled.

But the most exciting part is that verification is becoming preemptive. DV’s Brandshield Connect is increasingly being integrated into exchanges, DSPs and ad network ad servers to verify impressions before they are served.

“This way you can better manage your yield as an ad network by asking us in real-time how to deliver the impression,” says Netzer. “Marketers can bid on impressions on exchanges knowing they’ve past the DV criteria already in terms of their quality and brand safety.”

Dancing by Itself

Among the numerous charges levied against ad verification and its providers, the most damning may be that it’s another adjunct technology layer taking up space in the grotesquely cluttered display ecosystem. Worse, there are endless complaints about verification providers being middleman who simply bump up prices (dramatically according to some accounts).

But more important, the questions persists: why isn’t verification a technology that the media-buying platform — be it network, DSP or exchange — provide?

“Verification existed before we came along; it was always first party,” Netzer answers. “All the networks claimed they did some kind of verification internally until we came along. When we came along we found so many problems that the agencies saw first-party wasn’t working.”

Netzer cites two reasons for why a verification service should be a third party. First, ad networks are a principal in the transaction, making money off the inventory they’re signing off on as quality.

“It’s a huge conflict of interest because at the end of the day they have to deliver the amount of impressions they promised,” he says. “If they want to make a bigger margin, who’s going to say they aren’t going to use less-quality inventory.”

Second, there huge advantages to having verification as a core competency. Take the Tag Monitoring solution for an example — networks simply don’t have the technology to quickly identify nested iFrames or tag-jacking, he says.

“Some players seem to think verification is simply content classification, but that’s not what it is,” chimes in Jennifer Hyman, vice president of marketing. “It’s the technology behind it, the ability to actually see where the ad is being delivered and making sure its appropriate.”

However, the acquisitions of AdXpose and Adometry by comScore and ClickForensics — two companies whose core competencies are certainly not verification — cast further doubt about whether verification operations could stand alone. comScore aimed to integrate AdXpose into its analytics offerings while Adometry (the merged entity took that name) has its sites on attribution.

DV’s worthiness as a standalone business can be judged by the Series C haul, Netzer says, particularly considering one of the lead investors: JMI, the company that brought DoubleClick private before it was sold to Google.

“JMI knows the ad space better than anyone, and I think they’ve seen a lot of similarities between us and DoubleClick,” Netzer says.

The narrow view of verification as mainly a brand-safety function is going to disappear as its functionality keeps expanding, he suggests.

“Verification is becoming ubiquitous, it’s on every impression,” Netzer comments. “We believe it’s becoming the standard for measurement of campaigns, even from an impression standpoint.

“Verification is here to stay, and it’s thriving and expanding in terms of what it can do.”

The report measured traffic quality across Anchor’s search engine, ad network and advertiser clients from April through June and labeled clicks as valid or invalid. Although the invalid rate dipped from 36.1% in the first quarter to 29.8%, this was primarily due to significant drop in the “innocuous” invalid (for example, a consumer accidentally double-clicking on an ad) from 7% to less than 1% in the second quarter. Attempted click fraud, however, only slid from 29.2% to 28.9%.

Anchor cited less robot traffic from indexing website spiders and test clicks by networks and search engines for the fall in innocuous traffic, and noted that such traffic is regularly prefiltered by ad providers and does not affect ad spend.

According to its Anchor’s analysis, fraudsters seem to be circling around the smaller fish. Anchor customers with more than 1 million daily clicks consistently reported higher volumes and lower attempted click fraud, leading Anchor to believe more successful and better protected ad networks and search engines are receiving less attention from fraudsters. Instead they have their sites on less established and more vulnerable depots.

“Click fraud attempts are not going to go away any time soon,” said Anchor Intelligence CEO Ken Miller. “Cybercriminals will simply reallocate their attempts from well protected ad networks and search engines to those that do not have a fortified line of defense.”

Once the game plan is set you must select the team that can make it all happen. You have creative folks, the people that create the look and feel of your site, in one end of the conference room and the technology team, the group that brings the creative vision to life, on the other. That’s the team you need to succeed right? Before you answer that question give it some thought.

What about the IT department? Yes, you heard me right, the IT department. The team that sits in the back room and makes sure the Web site is live, gets your Blackberry up and running and removes viruses that have taken your computer prisoner. The IT department represents the blood and guts of an organization and with online campaigns becoming more and more dependent upon technology and placing greater potential strain on the organization’s infrastructure, bringing the IT department into these discussions is essential.

Now that you are scrambling to send out Outlook invites to the IT team, keep in mind that this needs to be a two-way discussion for this relationship to work. Both sides have needs that must be met for the organization to find success. For now, let’s begin with your IT team. Before you introduce the plans for the next marketing program to them, here are a few considerations to think about.

First, don’t develop and staff your own applications without at least discussing it with IT. If the team does so, IT does not have the expertise or the staff to support these applications because they usually are not well-documented. Look around your marketing department right now. If you’ve got database programmers helping to stir the pot, the IT folks are going to tell you flat out that you are crossing the line. The IT department needs to be in on the ground floor of all application development because they, ultimately, are responsible for the maintenance and execution of them.

The second thing IT will tell you is to stop messing around with the network. After all, one wrong step can turn the network on its head and have huge ramifications for the company. There are concerns about a wide range of things including security, bandwidth and most importantly reliability. What is the point of having really cool applications if it crashes your network? Most marketers are unaware of how problematic it can be for a network manager, the person whose job depends upon network performance and uptime, to suddenly be presented with a series of major delays or outages caused by a rogue Web server that they didn’t even know existed. A move such as this can literally bring an entire company to a standstill.

The third issue that is important to your IT team is sticking with packaged solutions whenever possible. Ideally, they will recommend a solution from a vendor who has already built all the interfaces with the software the company runs on its enterprise and has tested them with dozens of other clients. Going this route takes a tremendous amount of work (and time) out of the assessment and development process. In a worst-case scenario, the IT department will tell you to go with a solution that was professionally developed and supported, fully documented and is based on industry standards.

While you are mulling over these guiding principles make sure you take the opportunity to get some IT-related questions ready yourself. After all, success requires execution on all sides. A good starting point is response time. As a marketer, its seems as though every time I ask IT for anything their answer inevitably starts with, “We’ll have to do a scoping study.” This is a major problem because scoping studies can take up to 14 months, the cost for which will be charged back to marketing. The funny thing is that this 14-month wait, which represents a lifetime in the marketing business, is generally the instigating catalyst for why the marketing team builds their own system, the first “no no” highlighted above.

Another item you may want to delve into in detail is cost – specifically cost of these scoping projects. As it stands now, marketing ordinarily flips the bill for the scoping study that lays out how much the project is going to cost and whether or not it is feasible. If the project is given the green light, marketing then has to pay for the overhead often embedded in the IT function. With budgets shrinking in all departments, this meeting is the best opportunity to talk about how both sides can be more efficient in getting to the “go/no-go” point. By discussing the timeline for deliverables during the preparation stages, both sides can reach compromises that streamline this process and help keep projects on track.

The last area you may want to talk to IT about is flexibility. Marketing has become more and more critical to the success of the organization — be it revenue generation, brand development or pricing. Taking this into account, IT needs to begin anticipating the degrees of flexibility that marketing will need and design some adaptability into the foundations of systems architecture.

If you really want your business to have a world-class marketing capability, you have to think of marketing as a primary customer of IT, not a secondary one. Then you have to bring the two sides together. By doing so at the onset of the next project you are taking the first step in that direction.