When news broke that ICE had issued a request for information asking how ad tech providers could support its investigations, the industry reacted with alarm. Executives like Brian O’Kelley of Scope3 warned publicly about what it could mean if the same infrastructure used to target ads is used to track and identify individuals. These are legitimate concerns, and the stakes at hand are serious.
For me, however, the story surfaced a different, familiar concern.
I’ve spent years watching a version of this dynamic play out inside ad tech’s verification industry. The details are not the same, nor are the consequences, and I want to be clear that I am not drawing a direct link between immigration enforcement and ad verification. But the structural problem, which includes power exercised without consent, accountability or any agreed-upon framework, is one publishers know intimately.
Power has a tendency to outgrow the rules that were supposed to contain it. Once this happens, the people affected by those decisions are left relying on systems they had no role in shaping and no practical way to challenge.
Consent was never part of the deal
For us in ad tech and games, publishers did not agree to let companies that detect invalid traffic assess their inventory. Nor did they consent to having their bidstream data rated by organizations whose methodologies they had no hand in writing and no ability to challenge.
Yet these companies have become de facto gatekeepers across the industry. They produce data that gets publishers flagged, penalized and removed from platforms, often with no warning, no explanation and no recourse.
Publishers have been removed from platforms on the basis of verification data that, when examined closely, turned out to be flawed, with crawlers misidentifying legitimate inventory and flags that could not withstand scrutiny. Despite the incorrect data, publishers have still lost revenue and have had no means to push back.
Nobody agreed to give these companies this kind of power. Verification companies have simply positioned themselves as neutral arbiters of quality, and the industry has treated their outputs as fact. Publishers have never been invited to the table where those decisions were made.
The parallels with what we have seen recently are obvious.
ICE’s request for information describes commercially available data as an increasingly valuable resource for its investigations. The ad tech industry has spent decades building the infrastructure to collect, organize and act on that data. Most people who download an app, watch a video or click a link consent to, at most, seeing targeted ads. They’re not consenting to have their behavior logged and made available to federal investigators.
Industry figures and lawmakers are concerned that ICE is operating outside the accountability structures most people would expect of a federal agency. This is not an abstract concern when the data being discussed was built from the everyday digital activity of hundreds of millions of people who never thought twice about accepting a cookie banner.
The parallel between ICE and ad verification is in this pattern of behavior: Systems built for one purpose, governed by the interests of a narrow group of stakeholders, are being used in ways the people subject to them never wanted or even imagined.
Self-regulation is not the answer
As AdExchanger’s Allison Schiff noted earlier this year, the industry’s response to the ICE story has been a “deafening silence.”
When the industry does respond to moments like this, the instinct is often to promise better self-regulation. But, as publishers know, voluntary frameworks sound reassuring until you’re the party with no seat at the table and no voice in the decisions being made about your business.
For years, the verification industry has operated on voluntary frameworks, and publishers are simply expected to comply. When these frameworks produce bad data, there is no outside body with which to appeal. The companies writing the standards and the companies benefiting from them are, in too many cases, the same companies.
Independent oversight is not a radical idea. It is the standard response to unchecked power in almost every other context. Financial markets have regulators, food safety has inspectors and even advertising has the FTC. The IAB plays an important role in setting industry guidelines, but it cannot enforce them. Membership is voluntary, compliance is self-reported and there is no independent system for holding parties accountable when standards are not met.
What ad tech has never built is a body with real enforcement authority. One that can set standards for how data in the ecosystem is collected, used and verified, and ensure those standards are actually followed. This matters for everyone with skin in the game: publishers, brands, ad tech platforms and the public.
This is exactly what publishers have been pushing for in the context of IVT and ad quality: a neutral verification framework that publishers have a hand in building. One that exists without a commercial stake in its own outcomes and that provides a real process for challenging decisions that affect people’s livelihoods. Efforts like the Publisher Coalition have started laying groundwork here, but the broader industry needs to get behind the idea, not just one initiative.
The ICE situation is a reminder that the infrastructure built by the ad tech industry, and the governance frameworks it has failed to build, have consequences that reach further than campaign performance metrics. When nobody is watching the watchers, the problem has a way of spreading.
Publishers have learned this lesson the hard way, and the rest of the industry may be about to learn it, too. It is time to drive change.
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community.
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