Use Cases
Some possible areas for the BG to work on divided by role in the Web advertising ecosystem.
Creative
Are there opportunities for new formats for ads? For example, SVG SMIL-based animation works without JavaScript and does need external CSS that might not load, and hence may be more secure.
Analytics and Ratings
Reliable reporting back when an ad has been seen, even if it’s behind a corporate firewall that caches pages. See e.g. intersection observer, but some people say that it’s not sufficient for advertisers. We need to get advertisers to say why. Maybe we need a definition of what it measnto have seen an ad – seen 70% of it? All the text? Watched 3 out of 4 seconds of an animation?
Ad Channels and Distribution
Some big problems for these folks include receiving ads with malicious code in them. How does this fit with ads.txt? Should W3C maintain a “well-known URLs” registry? Should we push for a safer ad format?
Data retention and tracking and privacy is a big deal right now. Third-party anonymous tracking (cf. verifiable claims/credentials) may be a way forward for targeted ads.
Note: targeted advertising is a $100bn industry in the US alone. The difference in effectiveness between targeted, tracking-based advertising and general advertising is huge, I mean like really huge, HUGE. And it also makes a HUGE difference to the user experience of people exposed to the ads.
Fraud Detection
[ad integrity notes from brendan]
There is Ad-ID ( http://www.ad-id.org/ ) who provide trusted source of ad metadata and is decently positioned to insert root certificates. There’s also Signed Bid Request ( https://iabtechlab.com/~iabtec5/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/OpenRTB-3.0-Draft-Signed-Requests-RFC.pdf ) that, in it’s current form, establishes trust from seller (“Publisher”) to buyer (“Advertiser”), rather than from buyer to browser (“Consumer”).
Another area around integrity of an ad is the Cloudflare Firebolt ( https://blog.cloudflare.com/firebolt/ ) effort which delivers AMP creative that is “cryptographically signed to ensure that it meets the required [AMP] format and security standards.” This shows a model whereby third parties verify ad payload and incrementally sign as to their expertise.
Web site owners (“publishers”)
Note: The ad industry calls people who run Web sites ”publishers”, and the places where the ad channel network will show ads as ”ad slots”.
Publishers care about ads that fit in with their Web site, are served quickly, do not contain malicious code, and don’t damage their reputation. The industry is moving towards responsive ads rather than the fixed-pixel sizes IAB used to promote. However, there’s generally no control over getting ads that respect the user’s font size, or that are accessible in general, or that have a background texture to match a publisher’s Web page, or that have useful alt text if it’s an image, and this is perceived as a problem.
Inappropriate ads are an ongoing problem for publishers.
Every time someone clicks on an ad they leave the publisher’s Web site. This isn’t always a good thing, but they almost never come back again. See next item.
Advertisers
Click fraud costs advertisers a lot of money, as does being charged for impressions that the user never saw (e.g. because they didn’t scroll down the page far enough).
In-ad purchases would be great for both publishers and advertisers, as the user wouldn’t leave the page containing the ad – hence helping to reduce bounce rates.
Ads placed near inappropriate content are as big a problem as inappropriate ads placed next to good content are for publishers.
