Gavin Dunaway’s Post

Remember that #polyfill malware attack the other week that had household brands spreading phishing redirects? Here’s a solid explainer from Patrick Ciavolella of The Media Trust about how good sites go bad… against their will!

Add in automated ad QA management, advanced policy management, and publisher brand safety controls, and you got yourself a damn tight workflow. The Media Trust

Sigh, this “will they won’t they” plot is tiresome even for a CBS show. 😜 https://lnkd.in/eK24kgMB

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Who didn't love adolescence? Pimples, weird hair growth, funny odors... Well, fortunately, #retailmedia's adolescence is less yucky on a biological front, but it's still kinda awkward with retailers struggling to meet brand demands around scale and measurement. Fortunately, the #retailmediasummit panel with Austin Leonard, SVP Business Development for Epsilon Retail Media, and Cory Schnurr, Head of Marketplace Innovation, and Gavin Dunaway (me!), Marketing Director, of The Media Trust dove into how smarter workflows and adding automation can help retail media operations get past the awkward days—and by that we mean scaling fast and driving more revenue. A key takeaway: automating ad quality assurance and creative screening speeds campaign launches and allows retailers to quickly scale the amount of campaigns they bring on. This is a manual process that should be first on the list when it comes to automation. Beyond that, ad QA tools empower retailers to ensure their nuanced brand policies are being met—yes, it's brand safety for As Leonard mentioned on-stage, bringing automation to the foundation of your retail media program is essential—convoluted, manual processes will be difficult to cut out as you attempt to grow. And the brand benefit? More timely campaigns with faster results and greater flexibility for optimizing. Automating ad QA pays off all around—it's just a part of growing up in digital media... and it doesn't have to be as painful as ACTUAL adolescence. Path to Purchase Institute

Who is that mysterious figure battling the forces of digital darkness (like #Polyfill!) from the depths of the #malware cave? Why, it’s Pat-man! And why has Pat-man never been seen at the same time as The Media Trust’s Patrick Ciavolella?

That is a fascinating take...

Some of us at The Media Trust are in disbelief of the scope of the #PolyFill attack and all the major brands compromised. I'm not going to blab here, but we are talking household names. All kinds of ad campaigns shut down, legit brand websites delivering #phishing redirects. When I started talking about #PolyFill at the #RetailMediaSummit, a few people replied, "Oh yeah—we're dealing with that right now." What's particularly interesting is the gaps in #cybersecurity that PolyFill exposed; we were able to flag the polyfill[.]io domain early and inform advertisers that their landing pages and websites were compromised. But because cybersecurity/#appsec is so focused on source code, they're overlooking the constantly shifting ecosystem of third-party code across digital properties. Increasingly, this is the vulnerability that threat actors are going to exploit because they can tell no one's guarding that part of the shop. And it's EASY to do—bad guys simply bought the expiring domain for a widely used JS library. The way to head off these threats is regular/continuous monitoring of digital properties—but it has to be done with actual devices and smart profiles, because the bad actors have tools to sniff out security bots (ironically, it's basically viewability/bot-detection tech used by verification companies). This is not something you can build overnight—it took The Media Trust ~20 years to build up the global Media Scanner infrastructure. So yes, I'm pitching a bit—but it's because I can't imagine how much revenue was lost in the PolyFill debacle, AND how much consumer data was stolen. And that stolen data will be used to fuel larger and more detrimental attacks—with incalculable collateral damage. Think gas shortages, hospitals unable to access patient records and systems, massive data breaches. https://lnkd.in/eJaaEitY