#66: Forensic AdTech SpaceScape
Reading Time: 7 forensic minutes
Happy New Year! Quo Vadis wishes you a happy, healthy, prosperous 2024!
We’re kicking off the new year with an inaugural Quo Vadis SpaceScape. It’s an emerging space we’re calling Forensic AdTech. As far as we can tell, Forensic AdTech sprouted green shoots a few years ago and blossomed in 2023. We think 2024 will be a growth spurt year for this exciting sector.
Defining Forensic AdTech
Forensic AdTech is used by various supply chain actors (e.g. advertisers, agencies, DSPs, data providers, SSPs, and publishers) to “see” the difference between what they think is going on and what is really going on.
Another way to describe it is to say that Forensic AdTech takes customers on a journey from known unknowns to knowing and enlightenment. Yet another way to think about this sector is to interpret it through the eyes of Jeff Bezos:
"We humans are not really truth seeking animals. We are social animals. [Advertising] truths often don't want to be heard, because important truths can be uncomfortable…any high performing [advertising] organization has to have mechanisms and a culture that supports truth telling."
If you prefer a more clinical definition, Forensic AdTech can be described as the application of forensic techniques and principles to the field of advertising technology which involves analyzing data to uncover insights, patterns, and misconceptions. In some cases, fraudulent behaviors or malpractices are also undercovered.
Anyway you cut it, forensic adtech is used to find out what is true. Recall that Quo Vadis has always leaned on the primary principle of radical transparency and recommends that supply chain actors answer three simple questions:
What do you want from adtech?
What is true about adtech?
Are you practicing what is true to get what you want?
Let’s Peel Back Forensic AdTech From The Outside In.
Demand and Supply: The outer parameter is bound by two primary market forces: 1) demand side on the left and 2) supply side on the right.
Notably, each side of the market has a unique feature whereby consumers — who demand products from advertisers and also demand content from publishers — are buffered by a layer of data privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA. As privacy protectionism and enforcement unfold over the coming years, it’s reasonable to expect growth in customer adoption, new company births, funding, competition, and M&A.
Age Continuum: Companies at the top of our spacescape are the oldest while players on the bottom half are younger. We made a best effort to approximate the vertical location of each logo to align with age. The little circle ✪ with a number on the upper right of each box shows the average age of the companies in each sub-category. Age data is sourced from LinkedIn and Crunchbase.
Territorial Divide: The Forensic Adtech SpaceScape illustrates two primary territories:
On the left side, you’re looking at the logos of the 42 forensic adtech players we’ve identified thus far. They are divided into 9 sub-categories (discussed below).
On the right side closer to publishers, we placed an adjacent space filled by consent management platforms (CMP). We labeled it “Consent Management & Privacy Compliance” to be more precise. Most of these 20 companies were born before 2018 (14 of them) and have an average age of 9 years.
Looking at the 9 categories within the Forensic AdTech territory, we make an important distinction between “old school” players in the grey-hashed Media Monitoring box (DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, etc.) and the actual forensic adtech players in the blue-hashed boxes.
The average age of media monitoring companies is 13 years. Two of them are public companies (DV and IAS) and one (Moat) was acquired by Oracle for $850 million in 2017 after raising $67 million.
We felt compelled to separate media monitoring players and CMPs from pure-play forensic adtech companies for a very good reason. While they might dabble here and there in the forensic sandbox, one can also argue that the 42 forensic adtech players exist because of what is not looked at or ignored by media monitoring and CMP companies.
In other words, forensic adtech exists to get various jobs done that media large monitoring companies and CMPs don’t do, can’t do, or won’t do. Since they are older and have cash on their balance sheets, it seems reasonable to believe they will likely be on the acquisitive side of forensic adtech M&A in 2024 and 2025.
Forensic AdTech Jobs-To-Be-Done
As of January 2024, we’ve identified 42 companies across eight sub-categories in the forensic adtech space (ex-Media Monitoring).
Average age = 6 years
Total funding = $336 million (Crunchbase)
Total Employees = 1590 (LinkedIn).
Log Data/Supply Chain Analysis & Research: The five players we’ve included operate in the log data and/or research space. For example, Jounce Media collects a robust data set, but not log-level data. Of the log data players — Fiducia (aka TAG TrustNet), Adalytics, Fenestra, and Fou Analytics — some use a tag-based deterministic approach to match logs across DSP, SSP, ad verification, and publisher logs while others use probabilistic matching. Notably, this sub-space is the least funded across our spacescape.
Privacy-Enhancing Tech: When you visit any website, you’ll likely get a pop-up message asking you for explicit consent before the site collects or processes any personal data. These consent messages are typically managed by one of those 20 CMPs in the Consent Management Platform/Privacy Compliance box.
But what if actual consent never really happens? What if the CMP tag fires out of sequence? When site owners need an evidence trail to defend against potential government claims, they’ll turn to Privacy-Enhancing Tech players for assurance.
Quo Vadis covered this topic last year in a podcast with Compliant’s CEO (Jamie Barnard). We also posted written interview with more details about the space.
Ad Security: This sub-category refers to measures and practices put in place to protect digital advertising campaigns and the associated data from various threats and vulnerabilities. We’ve only recognized two so far: Human (ex-WhiteOps) and Confiant. The former plays on the sell side and the latter on the buy side. If you think we are missing anyone, please leave a comment.
Targeting Data: When it comes to audience targeting, which is the raison d'être of programmatic advertising, it has always come down to a trade-off between the accuracy of data and scale (e.g. reach). For instance, when a brand is targeting females between 18-34, it does not want to spend money on ads for males of any age. In the case where contextual data is used (Peer39), advertisers want the content to match intent as closely as possible.
Notable, now there is a third vector in play beyond the accuracy and scale. Nowadays the data also has to satisfy data privacy laws.
Environment (ESG): The companies in this sub-category help actors at every point in the supply chain to quantify and rectify carbon emissions. Scope3 is the largest by funding ($20M) and Good-Loop is the largest by employee count (54).
Social (ESG): We created this sub-category to illustrate how forensic adtech works in the content quality space. These players rate the news and news-like sources for bias, reliability, and fact-checking. The Factual (founded in 2016) was acquired by Yahoo last year for an undisclosed amount.
Media Governance: Bad things happen when hands-on-keyboard people make mistakes during manual campaign setup processes. The two worst outcomes are wasted spending and reputational risk. Media Governance players typically run APIs into various digital ad platforms (search, social, programmatic display, etc.) to catch mistakes before campaigns go live. We only know of three players in this space and expect to see new entrants enter the arena as well as new offerings from existing in adjacent sub-categories companies.
Quo Vadis covered this topic last year in a podcast with AdFidence’s CEO (Jacek Chrusciany). We also posted written interview with more details about this common sense space.
Metadata Connectivity: This sub-category is the most challenging to classify because these companies play across several other sub-categories. For example, Sincera and DeepSee offer a combination of MFA discovery, attention-based targeting, ad configuration/quality, competitive analysis, and privacy compliance.
Quo Vadis covered this topic last year in a podcast with DeepSee’s CEO (Rocky Moss). We also posted written interview with more details about the MFA space.
Your Feedback Please
Creating company/market landscapes is an imperfect exercise but hopefully provides a rough guide to the Forensic AdTech space. If you know of other companies or sub-categories that you think we should include please let us know. Any feedback is very much welcome.
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Regarding the "Ad Security" section that includes HUMAN Security as "Sell-Side" and Confiant as "Buy-Side"- Having worked at Human Security, there are three media solutions, one is a product that provides invalid traffic decisioning pre-bid, one that provides invalid traffic analysis post-bid, and the clean.io acquisition that protects publishers from malvertising. That being said, this is both buy and sell side. From the Confiant website, it looks like it is malvertising only, which would be more sell-side protection.
Thanks Alexis — we'll take all the extra color we can get!