Who's Protecting Online Advertising? AdXpose Vs. DoubleVerify Vs. AdSafe Media

 Social Media Monitoring research report by media planning and buying agency ExactDrive Inc.

Online advertising involves several different types of advertising, some of which are deployed ethically and some are not. These types can range from contextually targeted text ads next to search engine results, graphical banner ads, rich media ads, interstitial ads and several others. All together online advertising generates billions of dollars every year. With roughly 300 blog mentions and 400 Twitter mentions per day, online advertising is definitely a topic a lot of people are thinking about.

Naturally, whenever companies are spending billions of dollars on something they develop certain expectations. Online advertising is no different and companies expect to spend money on results and not to spend money advertising for one thing and receiving another such as advertising on websites they didn’t ask for, paying for impressions and clicks that didn’t really happen and advertising next to website content that can be harmful to their brand’s reputation.

Enter three companies trying to battle these issues and offer a peace-of-mind both to the advertisers and the media buying companies out in the field filling campaign orders, trying to make the campaigns work best for their clients.  AdXpose, DoubleVerify andAdSafe Media are the three companies in question, each offering a different explanation and methodology about how they are fighting against the issues of managing brand safety, maintaining website verification and preventing ads from displaying on unwanted websites and next to unwanted website content.

Using our social media monitoring and analysis tools we have discovered that despite online advertising being a several billion dollar industry with strong growth potential and despite nearly every advertiser you speak with having the same expectations and concerns the very companies with the potential solutions are not out promoting themselves on the Internet. The very medium they are working so hard to protect and make a safer place for online advertisers.

After announcing their new ad blocking feature in February AdXpose had their largest spike of blog and Twitter based chatter, spiking to seven blog mentions and nearly 30 Twitter mentions. Such stats may not sound like a lot (and they aren’t) but it’s a start and nearly double the amount of most buzz that either of their two competitors have received to date.

From the image below you can see that DoubleVerify has received the most consistent amount of blog and Twitter mentions over the past six months. They have done a good job at generating at least a little buzz nearly everyday, with their highest amount of chatter and most consistent mentions coming after they announced (in late December 2009) their own ad blocking feature called BrandShield. It appears that both AdXpose and especially AdSafe Media are being mentioned on blogs and on Twitter less consistently.

AdSafe Media, who completed a $2.5 million round of funding in October 2009, appears to have the least amount of blog and Twitter mentions out of the three above companies. The most blog mentions they received appears to be around the end of January, which would be in align of them releasing their fourth quarter analysis of the online display advertising industry. Still that release appears to have only generated them two blog mentions. AdSafe Media’s mentions on Twitter are all most non-existent.

The above figures obviously don’t take into account all of the personal phone calls and face-to-face meetings each of these companies are having and scheduling everyday. We simply wanted to share a couple facts about how often people are mentioning them in blogs and on Twitter. It will be interesting to watch for new future announcements and feature releases from each of them.

Disclosure: ExactDrive has had a lengthy and positive relationship AdXpose but that in no way influenced our report on how often they were mentioned in blogs or talked about on Twitter as a whole.