This post is by Yahoo, a MediaMath OPEN partner, and a version of it also appears on the Yahoo Advertising Blog.
The health and safety of the fast growing and complex digital landscape is certainly a hot topic and an area of particular focus for us here at Yahoo. With the rise of programmatic advertising and billions of ads served daily, it’s critical for all players within the ecosystem to work together to create more secure and thus more successful online experiences.
Advertisers don’t invest great care to design beautiful and memorable creative just to see their ads rejected. This, however, is exactly what can happen if they don’t ensure proper encryption and if a photo, an animation, or another creative element is hosted on a non-secure server. This is something especially common with older display ads and can perpetuate online fraud, bot activity, and also negatively impact a marketer’s targeting strategies. Fortunately, with a few tweaks to enhance encryption, many ads could have far greater reach, all while taking a few steps closer to a safer, more secure online environment.
So what security considerations should marketers take when designing and serving online ads?
For us to serve ads, every component – including any tracking features – must be SSL-compliant. For the layman, SSL, or Secure-Socket Layer (SSL) encryption, indicated in URLs as HTTPS (compared to HTTP), works by checking a certificate to confirm the site or service to which you’re connecting is the verified site. Your browser and server then interact using unique codes to encrypt and process the information that’s sent, ensuring a more secure transmission. If you use images, animated graphics, or any other similar assets in your ads- including beacons and appended pixels- they must be delivered from an SSL-encrypted server.
Many agencies and advertisers are already building this best practice into all current creative as technology, media, and advertising companies increasingly move toward SSL as a requirement. Strengthening online security helps all of us confront bot traffic and other Internet fraud, which incur substantial costs for the industry and make audience targeting more challenging. Encryption is only one piece of this, much deeper, ongoing discussion. It should, however, be straightforward to guarantee that your server has a trusted SSL certificate.
Whether they’re engaging with our Digital Magazines or running ad campaigns across platforms, we’re happy to make SSL a trusted piece of the safety pie.