It is often noted by industry observers that transaction costs for directly sold display advertising remain unnecessarily high. Discrepancies are a big part of the problem. Every month publishers and advertisers must share ad serving reports and go through an arduous reconciliation process, often revealing campaign errors that could have been fixed earlier and kept advertiser budgets and publisher revenues on track.

In response, the IAB introduced the Impression Exchange standard last year. The Impression Exchange facilitates the exchange of ad serving data between publishers and third-party ad servers, providing publishers with daily updates on discrepancies to help flag potential issues. The use of the Impression Exchange is also central to the IAB and 4A’s new standard terms and conditions released earlier this year.

DoubleClick is proud to announce that we are the first advertising technology provider to achieve end to end compliance with the Impression Exchange. Additionally, we are working with our colleagues throughout the industry to ensure interoperability as they also adopt this new standard.

Publishers benefit from the Impression Exchange in a number of ways. First, this exchange of data reduces the need for publishers to log into multiple third party ad serving systems to manually retrieve campaign reporting, saving valuable time and effort. If discrepancies do arise, the Impression Exchange provides an early warning system that allows the problem to be resolved quickly. Lastly, adoption of this new standard should allow publishers to spend more time addressing the strategic needs of advertisers and less time resolving discrepancies.

Impression Exchange reporting is available today in North America for DART for Publishers customers, and integration with our full suite of DoubleClick publisher products is planned for the future. To get started with the Impression Exchange your advertiser must also choose to have it enabled. Currently, only DoubleClick for Advertisers has adopted this standard, but we’re ready to work with other third-party ad servers. Please encourage your agencies to request this feature to help fight discrepancies and make display buying more efficient for everyone.

Posted by Stephen Dove, Product Manager