The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), an advertising industry initiative to fight criminal activity in the digital advertising supply chain, has released updated certification guidelines for its Certified Against Fraud and Certified Against Piracy Seal Programmes.

The updated Certified Against Fraud Guidelines now require publishers to adopt and implement the ads.txt specification released by the IAB Tech Lab last May, while the updated Certified Against Piracy Guidelines offer the first opportunity for direct buyers and publishers to be awarded TAG’s Certified Against Piracy seal. In addition, TAG unveiled a new enforcement process for all of its certification programmes that enables individuals and entities to submit allegations of non-compliance for review and potential action by TAG.

“As an industry-led initiative, TAG continuously adapts our programs and requirements to incorporate new best practices, block evolving criminal attacks, and meet the needs of our dynamically changing marketplace,” said Mike Zaneis, CEO of TAG. “These new guidelines put teeth in the ads.txt initiative by requiring publishers to adopt it in order to receive TAG’s Certified Against Fraud Seal, and they move the ad buying and publisher communities from support to action in the fight against ad-supported piracy by giving each a simple path to certification.”

Ads.txt is an initiative designed to increase transparency around programmatic advertising by allowing publishers and distributors to publicly state which companies they have authorised to sell ads on their sites or via their inventory. According to the IAB Tech Lab, “participating publishers must post their list of authorised sellers to their domain. Programmatic buyers can then crawl the web for publisher ads.txt files to create a list of authorised sellers for each participating publisher. Then programmatic buyers can create a filter to match their ads.txt list against the data provided in the OpenRTB bid request.”

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