IDEA: Native Third Party Adservers – Defeat Adblocking in a Pro-Consumer Way

Disclaimer – The below are merely thoughts, presented in a haphazard way, I am not saying that the below is necessarily a good idea or even an idea that could ever work. It most certainly won’t be ready by end of play Thursday.

Most adblockers work by blocking certain third party domains from loading content into the browser. Domain blacklists are created and maintained that contain all the known URLs that serve up advertising.

The way around this, as some sites are looking at, is to create entirely native ad units; but these are expensive for clients and creative agencies to work with and don’t work for the wide range of small blogs and websites (that actually make up a great deal of the Internet) trying to make a bit of money from some ads. The other problem with native ad units is that clients need some way to third party track them so they can corroborate how many times they have been loaded and what users who see/click on them do next. It’s no good if the ads visibly appear but the trackers around them are blocked.

What if the third party adserver went entirely native, I know that’s sounds like a contradiction of terms but stay with me. The way this could work would be similar to how many server to server tracking solutions work currently but with a twist that I’ll get on to in a second.

A native publisher adserver would make a server to server call to an advertiser adserver requesting the relevant creative to serve. When the creative is added to the page though it does it from it’s own domain, not a third party one. An adblocker has no way to block this by using the domain information alone; it could perhaps look at blocking certain scripts that trigger it or certain elements that are standard IAB sizes but such methods could probably be defeated with clever code obfuscation, dynamic scripts, etc. So the concept is to load the advert into the page in such a way that it is indistinguishable from the rest of the page content, there should be no way of telling in code that the ad in a blog article is in anyway different from the pictures in the article.

A way such an adserver could work on this blog for example could be via a wordpress plugin of some kind which handles the server to server calls and then retrieves and stores the creative assets locally before serving them up along with the rest of the page content.

So we now have the advert on the page but how do we track in all the way back to the third party system? The way server to server tracking works is through syncing and integrations, something that doesn’t work too well at scale because everything would need to integrate with everything else. What we need is a reduced set of “things” to integrate with; a handful of systems that have “identity knowledge” of very large sets of users capable of and trusted to vouch as to who a user is across multiple devices.

We are starting to get some of these already but they are “shady” to the general public because they hide their true intent in the T&Cs or use probabilistic matching to link devices back to a user without explicit consent.

What we need is a collection of what I’m going to call “incentivised identity providers”. These are platforms that users sign-up for with full knowledge of what the data they enter will be used for. So a user will have a profile into which they enter and maintain the device and cookie IDs of their various phones, tablets and computers, along with demographic and interest data, building up as full a profile as possible. Why would someone want to do this? This is where the incentives come in.

An IIP rewards a user for providing accurate and complete information, different providers could do this in different ways, a user may sign-up to multiple providers to get different kinds of benefits. These benefits could be things such as:

• Micro donations to charities for seeing ads
• Cashback
• Discounts
• Money off or extra data on mobile phone bills
• Mobile game lives/add ons
• Password management

Now this might sound a bit familiar. There are many schemes a bit like this already but none that I know of with the declared purpose of tracking users for the purpose of online advertising. Current schemes include things like store reward cards (points and coupons in exchange for your shopping habits) and even social networks (free photo storage, sharing and communication in exchange for your interests and demographic data).

A user led approach to this data could have many privacy benefits as well. A user could “become a new person” to all brands or even just one. In fact such a system could in theory allow settings to be changed on a per brand level. If a particular brand does something you don’t like, block just them from being able to track you, hit them where it hurts, their media budget. Without an individual to tie an ad to the impression (if it even serves) is wasted.

In order to keep things from becoming a major opt out exercise some concessions would need to be made. All brands should be opt-in to start off with and any blocking should be on a temporary basis with maybe even a 3 strikes and you’re out type system (you could even have a “yellow card” type feature that would let a brand know that you are not happy for some reason).

Such a system would have benefits for fraud, viewability and brand safety. By borrowing techniques for the payment processing sector technology could be used that works out if users are real and that they could actually have seen the number of ads for which their ID data is requested for. For brand safety there could be a global blacklist of sites that all IIPs sign-up to giving a single place to add the latest illegal football streaming site to. Strict rules as to what data (such as page content, etc.) is passed on the server to server call could be imposed and spot checked to ensure compliance.

What I’m describing in effect is a CRM/DMP/audience system for the world (or perhaps specialist IIPs could exist for certain sectors or countries). A small number of large scale Incentivised Identity Providers, empowering and rewarding users to control their identity online would allow for brands to tap into rich and fully deterministic data on consumers but ensure that they use it wisely. If they don’t they risk being cut off and cast out into the anonymous wilderness.