by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, October 31, 2017

Sizmek, an independent buy-side advertising platform, on Tuesday announced its partnerships with DoubleVerify, comScore and Integral Ad Science (IAS) to provide advertisers with greater workflow efficiency for HTML5 video measurement.

Working with Sizmek’s data and services, the company’s Verification API framework provides a unified way of trafficking — as opposed to manually wrapping and sending tags back and forth between technology providers, which can delay campaign launches, amplify human error and add latency.

The partnership, built on the new API, eliminates the need to wrap ad tags by allowing partners to integrate directly within the Sizmek ad-serving infrastructure. It aims to create greater control and transparency for brands as the ad supply chain becomes more complex, and supports advanced levels of third-party video measurement and authentication, according to Mike Caprio, chief growth offer at Sizmek.

Caprio sees not having to wrap ad tags as one of the biggest benefits, despite a common practice for vendors to wrap the tags from the ad server for video verification and viewability.

Wrapping tags takes time. “You’re literally exporting tags from the ad server, sending those tags to vendors, modifying those tags and then sending them back out hoping that everything still works,” he wrote in an email to Digital News Daily. “If a tag was wrapped incorrectly, your tag might not work or the data might get associated with the wrong campaign or placement.”

The process is prone to error. Wrapping tags actually impacts the user experience because adds layers of additional calls before the actual ad itself is served. Depending on the latency, this may even lead to discrepancies between the ad server and the verification provider.

The move into unchartered territory is not without challenges. Sizmek has been working on this API, and made it available to select partners and customers before HTML5 VPAID became common practice. Originally it was a Flash-based solution enabled for HTML5 VPAID. All along the idea remained the same, one API that partners can build on without putting constraints on the services they offer. All of the capabilities they offer with wrapping can be achieved with the API, according to Caprio.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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