Intro

One of a leading digital tech powerhouse and integrator serving hundreds of publishers, most of them in Italy. The company manages ad inventory for a network of European publishers, and helps publishers monetize by partnering with SSPs to increase overall demand within its network. They are also the first Italian company certified for Alibaba, WeChat, and Baidu. Among the media services, they provide solutions to drive the audience and increase programmatic monetization. Their business model depends on the trust of its publisher clients, which in turn depends on the safety of its clients’ audiences. Sitting between publishers and advertising demand partners, they manage a complex set of relationships. That complexity necessitates proactive – rather than reactive – solutions for security issues.

The Problem: Finding Redirects In A Haystack

Their publisher clients reported that their users were experiencing auto-redirects in large numbers—mostly on mobile. Their responsibility to its clients was to seek out the sources of redirects, and to work with demand partners to halt the problem. However, their team felt they were not equipped to manage the problem in real time, and that they had only limited insights into developing effective and reactive solutions. Detecting the source of malicious ads involved a great deal of manual work. Their team needed to reach out to each of their many SSPs (which required substantial troubleshooting time), and it did not stop new attacks elsewhere across their network. They were not even certain of how many redirect attacks they needed to address at any given time. The inability to address the full scope of the auto-redirects began to negatively impact on their relationships with its publishers. Some publishers simply removed their code from their sites. In other cases, they turned off demand partners that were delivering bad ads until they could resolve their issues. While SSPs of all sizes were targeted by malvertisers, there was one month in which the greatest source of redirects was also one of the largest SSPs in the ad ecosystem. This negatively affected their publishers’ ability to monetize to the fullest.

The Solution

They engaged Limeproxies for security solutions prior to these waves of redirect attacks. At this point, they decided to implement Limeproxies real-time solution for monitoring and blocking malicious and inappropriate ads. A Limeproxies account representative worked with them to implement the blocking solution within a single day. The implementation required few technical resources of their team, who were able to manage the process through a simple implementation page. After one week of monitoring and blocking unwanted ads through Limeproxies , they discovered that the problem was more widespread than they originally believed, and they began working closely with Limeproxies to address it. They learned that their publisher network had experienced around 100,000 cases of unwanted ads. Previously, the volume of ad security-related emails they had received numbered in the hundreds. They found that Limeproxies support delivered fast, clear and specific guidance, and action whenever it was necessary. After implementing Limeproxies real-time solution, they noticed the redirects almost entirely vanished. Weeks later, a very small number of new redirects surfaced, but Limeproxies quickly addressed the new issue and blocked those attacks from happening again as well. By delivering safe, quality ads, they were able to maintain its reputation with its publishers, and grow more stable partnerships. They were also able to turn on any of its demand partners they had paused, and to add new demand partners to its stack. With more overall demand, their publisher clients are now better able to maximize the revenue and overall value that delivers to them. They found that Limeproxies solution provided their team not only with security, but with peace of mind that allowed them to focus on their core business needs more easily.

Moving Forward

They has now asked its publisher partners to implement Limeproxies real-time monitoring and blocking solutions as well, in order to enhance end-to-end security across and also beyond their network. They see value in making the entire ad ecosystem more secure for all involved. When users find their publishers to be reliable and trustworthy, those publishers and can work together, moving forward on more advanced strategies for meeting their long-term business goals.