PULSEPOINT’S BRAND SAFETY POLICY AND IMPRESSION QUALITY INDEX™

Impression Quality Overview:

Our Impression Quality Index™ (IQIndex™) is the first of its kind to capture, analyze and filter content, audience and environmental data to determine both Audience Quality and Inventory Quality. This holistic approach ensures that campaigns are delivered within relevant, brand safe contextual environments to the right audience.

Our platform provides a transparent buying and selling environment, dynamically integrating proprietary content data and audience data at the impression level. This transparency allows our partners to understand the inventory and audience in real-time to make the smartest buying and selling decisions possible. Our technology applies its proprietary brand safety and quality controls not simply at the campaign or domain level, but at the highly granular, highly effective impression level.

PulsePoint’s company ethos is that quality comes before quantity. This is to ensure that you get the highest return on investment and your consumers get the best online experience possible. In maintaining this ethos, every day, we block nearly a quarter of our total inbound traffic & inventory that does not meet our stringent quality standards.

Appropriate and Inappropriate Schedules

In compliance with the UKs Digital Trading Standards Group (DTSG) Good Practice principles,PulsePoint’s vetting process ensures that buyers can only display ads on appropriate sites. See Section A Content Guidelines below. Our inappropriate schedules are updated daily and used across all campaigns. All campaigns are monitored continuously using our proprietary XT3 content verification technology in addition to our global blocklists that fall outside our proprietary allowlist of brand-safe sites. This is also supplemented with third-party blocklists and partnerships with market leading brand safety solution providers.

Take Down Policy

The PulsePoint Portal is self managed by buyers, giving them the ability to block both content categories and specific website domains on a pre- and mid-campaign basis. In the eventuality of an ad appearing on a site against content that is deemed inappropriate, PulsePoint will work with the client to take the appropriate steps to remove this ad from the website as soon as possible and, where relevant, add the offending site to our global block list. Where an ad is not taken down in accordance with this policy, this will be dealt with on a case by case basis by discussion with demand side partners. Supply partners who have not adhered to the contents guidelines policy will be permanently barred from the PulsePoint Platform™.

How it works:

Our methodology combines both human and machine verification filters resulting in a rigorous, multi-variant approach to ensure both inventory and audience quality.

I. Inventory Quality Filters
We first asses for Inventory Quality using the following methodology:
1. Human Filters: We do not allow self-serve sign up and personally vet every single new publisher across our Account Management, Operations, Engineering & Data Science teams to ensure they are following the below Inventory Quality.
Guidelines:
A. Content Guidelines:
Inventory partners must adhere to these guidelines and will not deliver any Advertisement to any Website that contains or does any of the following:

  • Any obscene or pornographic material, adult material, or mature content including thinly censored nudity (for example, certain image hosting or free web hosting services)
  • Violent content, racial intolerance, or advocacy against any individual, group, or organization
  • Hacking/cracking content
  • Illicit drugs and drug paraphernalia
  • Excessive profanity
  • Gambling or promotion of gambling, unless approved
  • Content related to compensation programs where users are encouraged to click on ads or offers, perform searches, surf websites, read emails, or similar activities
  • Excessive, repetitive, or irrelevant keywords in the content or code of web pages
  • Sales or promotion of weapons or ammunition (e.g., firearms, fighting knives, stun guns)
  • Any content that is illegal or promotes illegal activity
  • Any content that promotes discrimination or infringes on the rights of others
  • Any material that infringes intellectual property rights, including but not limited to copyright andtrademark rights (see below)
  • Any file-sharing or torrent sites
  • Any offers for illegal activities, products or services
  • Promotion of fake documents, copied material, or paper mills
  • Websites made for the sole purpose of clicking on advertisements
  • Any content that is misrepresentative, defamatory, libelous, or that violates any applicable law or regulation
  • Any content that infringes or violates any copyright, trademark, patent, right of publicity, right of privacy, moral right, or other right of any third party
  • Spyware or malware
  • Inappropriate or controversial subject matter of any nature, including without limitation that which pertains to illegal activity or to hacking, cracking, or warez
  • Any page that is “under construction”
  • Any content directed to children under the age of 13

B. Alteration of Advertisements or Ad Tag
Inventory partners must comply with the following policies regarding PulsePoint’s Advertisement and ad tags:

  • Partners who try to alter or manipulate PulsePoints ad tags without PulsePoint’s consent will be blocked.
  • Inventory Partner may not, nor permit any other party to, alter or manipulate any ads or standard ad behavior in any way unless explicitly permitted in writing by PulsePoint or its buyers.
  • Inventory Partner may not, nor permit any other party to, alter any portion of the ad tag or code provided by PulsePoint or change the behavior, targeting, or delivery of Advertisements.

C. Ad Placement
‍Inventory partners must comply with PulsePoint’s “Polite” Ad Placement policies:

  • No more than five (5) ads may be displayed per page
  • Page content must not obstruct any portion of the ad displayed
  • No ads may be placed on any non-content-based pages
  • No auto-refresh
  • No ads may be placed on pages published specifically for the purpose of showing ads, whether or not the page content is relevant
  • Inventory Partners may not place video ads in in-stream video players without content or disabled playback
  • No in-banner video (does not include in-banner video Advertisements served by PulsePoint or an RTB Buyer)
  • No sound off in-stream video
  • No Below-the-Fold auto-play placements
  • Syndicated players must play content related to the site

D. Blocked Content
‍PulsePoint uses proprietary and third-party tools to block Website(s) that contain certain categories of content.
These categories include, but may not be limited to the following:

  • Abused Drugs
  • Adult Content
  • Bot Networks
  • Dynamic DNS
  • Elevated Exposure
  • Freeware and Software Download
  • General Email
  • Hacking
  • Illegal or Questionable
  • Instant Messaging
  • Internet Telephony
  • Malicious Embedded iFrame
  • Malicious Web Sites
  • Marijuana
  • Message Board and Forums
  • Nudity
  • Parked Domain
  • Pay-to-Surf
  • Peer-to-Peer File Sharing
  • Phishing and Other Frauds
  • Potentially Damaging Content
  • Potentially Unwanted Software
  • Proxy Avoidance
  • Racism and Hate
  • Sex
  • Sex Education
  • Supplements and Unregulated Compounds
  • Tasteless
  • Text and Media Messaging
  • URL Transition Sites
  • Violence
  • Weapons
  • Web Chat
  • Web Collaboration
  • Web Hosting

2. Global Blocklist Filters: Once a publisher passes the above Inventory Guidelines, its domain level sitelist(s) are dynamically matched against our extensive Global Blocklist to ensure they are not currently flagged as a questionable inventory source. Our Global Blocklist is monitored 24/7 and updated daily to reflect any changes in domain status.

3. Third-Party Filters: 3rd Party Filters After passing our Global Blocklist filters, we then match approved inventory sources against the quality procedures enforced by brand safety leaders like Integral Ad Science, Double Verify, and Pixalate.

II. Traffic Quality Filters
PulsePoint has proprietary traffic quality filters that scan and block what our Data Scientists have identified as 9 universal ‘suspicious traffic traits’. Our algorithms identify these traits and block any impression that displays:

  • Any characteristic that would be identified on internal and/or 3rd party blocklists.
  • Unusually high percentage of traffic coming in from a single type of web browser.
  • Unusually high number of repeat visitors, as measured by various metrics including IP address, browser cookie, etc.
  • Unusually high click through rate.
  • Unusually high or low ratio of IP addresses to unique visitors.
  • Unusually high ratio of visitors, whose browser data (height, width, scrolling ability and status) can’t be ascertained.
  • Unusually high discrepancies between measurement of ad-requests and ad-rendering. This measurement is performed by attaching a pixel to a web response which fires (or doesn’t) when the advertisement reaches a user.
  • Unusually high percentage of traffic from proxy or cloud-hosting service IP addresses.
  • Unusually high amount of unique visitors to a single IP address.

    Brand Safety Vendor Blocks

    -     Adult & Sexual
    - Drug Abuse
    - Violence
    - Profanity
    - Crime
    - Incentivized/Malware/clutter
    - Piracy/ Copyright Infringement
    - Hate Speech & Cyberbullying
    - Adult & Sexual
    - Alcohol
    - Aviation Disasters
    - Crime
    - Drug Abuse
    - Hate Speech & Cyberbullying
    - Human-made Disasters
    - Natural Disasters
    - Profanity
    - Terrorism
    - Tobacco & eCigarettes
    - Vehicle Disasters
    - Violence
    - Unmoderated UGC : Forums, Images & Video
    - Unknown Apps
    - 18+ Age Group Apps
    - Apps with Insufficient User Ratings
    - Official Apps with rating < 2 Stars
    - Official Apps with rating < 1.5 Stars
    - Avoid Fraud & IVT Impressions
    - Fraudulent Site / Apps
    - Sites / Apps with Historical Fraudulent & IVT Levels
    - Sites / Apps with Insufficient Fraud & IVT Stats


Ads.txt and Seller.json Compliance
‍Pulsepoint is fully committed to seller.json and ads.txtcompliance set by IAB tech labs. Pulsepoint sellers should adhere to the below

  1. The Publisher must either (a) own each PublisherProperty on which ads are served; or (b) have a direct, contractual relationship with the owner of each such Publisher Property on which such ads are served. If the Publisher Property in question has published an ads.txtfile, the Publisher’s account must be listed thereon as an authorized seller else, the Publisher Inventory will be blocked.

  2. In case of direct, contractual relationship with the owner of each Publisher Property, the SSP / Exchange should update the seller.json file indicating the relationship as "PUBLISHER"

  3. Bid requests from intermediaries must have a complete and accurate SupplyChain object with no more than one hops, i.e.maximum one intermediary in schain.

Join Our Commitment to Quality & Transparency
‍PulsePoint is committed to helping drive industry wide guidelines & adoption for brand security against malicious sites, high-risk inventory & suspicious traffic. This is an industry wide issue and concern that affects all players. New technology springs up every day looking to exploit any and all loopholes. Working together to sharing best practices, educating one another on quality guidelines & procedures will help mitigate and diminish their attempts.