Integral Ad Science started selling contextual targeting tools in 2020, and was explicitly named in a memo written by the Association of Online Publishers shared with Marketing Brew.
It’s one of several high-profile vendors accused of collecting and selling data outside of a publisher’s licensing agreements, something the trade group says is not only a violation of publisher terms and conditions, but also the “potential infringement of basic intellectual property rights. The AOP first recognized the issue when publishers began mentioning an increase in web crawler activity on their sites.
Companies providing contextual advertising products, like IAS, DoubleVerify, and Oracle, often use web crawlers and artificial intelligence to understand what’s happening on a website. They use these capabilities to offer different services to marketers.
Publishers have generally accepted that these companies will crawl their sites in the name of brand safety and viewability, but they have not agreed to let contextual vendors sell this data for targeting, which is in direct competition with the publisher’s own sales team.