Anzu and HUMAN Partner to Safeguard the In-Game Advertising Space

Cristina Blanaru Business, Digital & Media, Gaming, ITC, Start Up

Anzu, the world’s most advanced in-game advertising platform, and HUMAN Security, Inc. (formerly White Ops), the global leader in collective protection against sophisticated bot attacks and fraud, today announced a partnership that will safeguard the in-game advertising space by detecting invalid traffic (IVT), general invalid traffic (GIVT), and sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) among Anzu’s programmatic gaming inventory across mobile and PC.

Losses due to ad fraud are expected to continue to cost the industry billions of dollars each year, and sophisticated bots pose a significantly increasing threat to the gaming world. By leveraging HUMAN’s pre-bid and post-bid solutions, MediaGuard, Anzu ensures that campaigns run across its inventory retain low fraud levels, allowing them to continue to harbor a safe space where both advertisers and publishers can feel confident working together to effectively reach gamers around the world.

At this stage, IVT is less likely within in-game advertising environments than other advertising channels, and this new partnership will help safeguard the space to keep it that way. The initial data protected by  HUMAN showed that out of 23.5M events, Anzu’s IVT averaged out at 0.16% on mobile and 0.47% on PC. The Media Rating Council considers any score below 5% for invalid traffic as insignificant.

Itamar Benedy, Co-Founder and CEO, Anzu, said: “We’re committed to making advertising in games better and putting ad quality at the heart of everything we do, bringing digital standards in-game and partnering with the industry leaders that advertisers know and trust. We continue to partner with the world’s brand safety, transparency, measurement, and data privacy leaders to ensure our clients can measure media value across channels and build their media strategy accordingly. This new partnership with HUMAN will take our commitment to create a brand-safe, fraud-free ecosystem to the next level. ”

Recently, Anzu earned three major industry certifications: the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) Brand Safety Certified Seal, the TAG Certified Against Fraud Seal, and the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) UK Gold Standard Certification 2.0. Together in partnership with HUMAN, these certifications demonstrate Anzu’s ongoing commitment to promoting a safe, secure, and fraud-free ecosystem that benefits the entire advertising chain.

HUMAN was the first solution to be fully accredited by the Media Rating Council (MRC) for end-to-end coverage against sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) for desktop, mobile web, mobile in-app and connected TV (CTV). This includes accreditation for pre- and post-bid detection and mitigation of SIVT, which is notoriously challenging to detect as fraudsters attempt to mimic genuine user behavior. The partnership with Anzu ensures that customers and partners will be protected from emerging forms of in-game SIVT–background ad activity, hidden ads, misrepresentation/spoofing, measurement manipulation and more–while guaranteeing always-on     filtering and measurement across the platform.

Tamer Hassan, Co-Founder and CEO, HUMAN, said: “Anzu ensures gamers can play without interruption while enabling brands to enter into a trusted marketplace that is native, creative and dynamically updateable. This forward-looking partnership with HUMAN will strengthen our ability to fight sophisticated cybercrime while ensuring a seamless user experience across the advanced in-game advertising platform.”

Today, HUMAN verifies the humanity of more than 10 trillion digital interactions per week, offering enterprises a platform with unmatched visibility into fraudulent activity across the Internet. HUMAN achieves this scale through its continued expansion in cybersecurity, now offering a suite of products to protect the complete digital customer journey: BotGuard for Applications, BotGuard for Growth Marketing and MediaGuard. With new partners and enterprises now able to leverage the Human Verification Engine™, comes an even deeper understanding of the cybercrime landscape, enabling HUMAN to adapt continuously, staying ahead of adversaries and offering their clients collective protection against threat models they have yet to encounter.