SANTA CLARA, Calif. & NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Please replace the release with the following corrected version due to multiple revisions.

The corrected release reads:

Ozone Media, a leading global advertising technology provider, today announced a partnership with fraud detection company Forensiq. This partnership will help the display advertising industry overcome a major barrier in the adoption of programmatic, distrust, with a unique offering that validates the authenticity of a click through and impression and prevents ad fraud.

As recently reported by MediaPost, marketers could lose $6.3 billion to bots in 2015. This telling research conducted by the Association of National Advertisers and White Ops indicates that up 17 percent of programmatic ad traffic can be attributed to bots. This alarming data point underscores the need within the industry to address and employ methods which combat impression and click fraud. Today’s partnership will help more marketers put an end to ad fraud, while strengthening trust in programmatic.

“I believe transparency is our joint objective as together, Forensiq and Ozone Media can bring greater accountability to programmatic transactions,” said David Sendroff, CEO of Forensiq. “We are excited to integrate with Ozone Media’s existing technology to help more brands and marketers strengthen their programmatic strategies.”

“As a leading technology provider, we have a responsibility to our partners to ensure the best solutions possible, and with Forensiq, the wheels are set in motion to ensure that inventory is filtered at the source before entering the exchange. The advertiser will then be sold only filtered and clean inventory,” said Kiran Gopinath, Founder and CEO, Ozone Media. “This is a significant move towards addressing fraud detection in the programmatic space and our commitment towards restoring advertiser confidence will continue.”

Advertisers have not yet fully realized the benefits of programmatic. This in part is due to concerns around impression and click fraud. Impression fraud refers to ad impressions which are accrued using bots, without any human involvement. This in turn implies the publisher gets revenue from the sold ad placement, but the advertiser stands to lose since no human really ‘viewed,’ the ad, which was the intent behind advertising. Since programmatic inventory is bought and sold on a CPM basis, impression fraud can hurt the advertising dollars of a marketer. Click fraud comes a close second in being a menace for advertisers.

Within the ad tech ecosystem, buyers need to know what inventory is being sold to them, and publishers need to know that the ad creative scheduled to run isn’t going to respond to a bot. This requires an additional layer of security, like fraud detection services from Forensiq, which will filter out fraudulent activity associated with ads as well as impressions.

This is the first step among many to follow, in this area to not just combat impression fraud but also ad fraud to help brands advertise without worrying about the content of the page on which the ad might appear. Suspicious ads are typically placed on parked domains, or sites with objectionable content. Brand marketers wouldn’t wish to be associated with either of them in the interest of their brand image.

These proactive measures are being taken to restore advertiser confidence and introduce transparency in the seemingly murky programmatic transactions.