Transparency FAQs

IAB UK believes that increased transparency in the digital advertising supply chain is important as this makes it easier for buyers to understand which companies add the most value to their campaigns. Once this is established, those that add most value will be rewarded more, an important element of our overall vision to build a sustainable future for digital advertising.

There’s no silver bullet or magic answer for transparency, but anything to help buyers understand more about the different roles companies in the digital advertising ecosystem perform is a useful step forward. This is where IAB UK’s new Transparency FAQs come in. Transparency was a topic of one of the town halls at the 2018 Leadership Summit and the main outcome was the desire to equip buyers with a set of questions that they could ask suppliers so that they could understand more about their business and their attitudes towards transparency.

This set of Transparency FAQs has been developed by a group of IAB UK members from different parts of the industry to fulfil that aim. The questions fall under three different categories - Pricing, Placement and Data and are listed below.

Pricing

1 - What is your business model and how do you make money?

2 – Can you outline the full details of the agreement on a booking form / contract?

3 – Will you share who your trading partners are?

Placement

4 - Do you own the inventory you sell?

5 – If you don’t own your own inventory then how do you access inventory and which platforms do you use?

6 – Do you specify your media placements and positions?

7 - What insights do you provide back to advertisers?

8 – Does the inventory you own or access include UGC content?

9 - What brand safety measures do you use?

10 - Which industry standards have you been certified against?

11 - Do you have a policy in place for ad-misplacement?

12 - Are you happy to share your optimisation tactics?

Data

13 - Under GDPR what legal basis are you providing your services under?

14 – If consent is the mechanism then can you prove how you obtained it?

15 - Are you using the IAB Framework?

16 - What other 3rd party data partners require consent for your business to deliver its service?

17 - What do you do with data you obtain from advertiser’s campaigns or data tags?

18 - Are advertisers permitted to appoint their own 3rd party partners for verification and measurement?

19 – Will you provide a link to your privacy and data policies?

20 – Will you share how you build audience, contextual and targeting segments?  

All IAB UK members can provide answers to this common set of questions and those that have will have their answers included in their member profile on the IAB website. You can see who has currently provided answers using this link.

It’s important to note that the answers given are self-declared and are not independently checked or verified as is the case under industry-owned programmes such as JICWEBS, but the IAB believes that these answers are still useful as they provide an easy way to understand more about what businesses do and what their attitude towards transparency.