- Why are Google and The Trade Desk leaving TAG?
- What are the limits of TAG certification?
- How is AI exposing certification flaws?
- Why is annual certification falling behind?
- What should advertisers do instead?
Somewhere in Mountain View and somewhere in Ventura, two of digital advertising’s biggest players have quietly done something rather bold this year: they let their anti-fraud certifications expire. And they didn’t seem especially bothered.
Google and The Trade Desk have both stepped back from Trustworthy Accountability Group certification — the seal that, for the better part of a decade, has led brands to believe their money isn’t funding a bot farm in a business park somewhere, let alone being eaten by other, bigger forms of ad fraud.
Procter & Gamble, whose 2017 ultimatum arguably built the whole TAG industry in the first place, has quietly downgraded its own requirement from ‘you must’ to ‘we’d appreciate it.’ TAG itself has just posted its first-ever net decline in the number of certificates issued.
Opted out
TAG CEO Mike Zaneis said Google opted out because TAG certificates duplicated extensive Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditations already held by Google’s far-flung media properties.
Zaneis frames this as a resourcing decision, saying, “It’s not just money. It’s human resources,” explaining that every programme requires people, sometimes teams. It’s not an outright rejection of TAG; after all, Google remains a ‘Verified’ member on TAG’s leadership council.
TTD has made no public statement, but its stock is down 72%, and it has had a tumultuous time recently, according to journalist and editor Jack Neff.
But when the company that popularised the seal, the biggest media platform on Earth, and the largest independent ad-buying platform all edge towards the exit at once, it’s no coincidence. It’s a vote.
Meanwhile, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) is still at the podium with the model contract in hand, insisting that TAG certification remains best practice.
Excuse my scepticism, but even the ANA’s enthusiasm looks a touch more complicated up close, given that it now co-runs an analytics venture partly funded by some of the very platforms whose certifications are in question.
That’s simply a fairly normal, structural feature of an industry where the referees and several of the players increasingly share a locker room, and I don’t envy anyone trying to blow the whistle from in there.
TAG status isn’t even in the bidstream
Here is the detail that should genuinely give brands pause. TAG certification, however earnestly administered, never enters the auction. The system that, in the blink of an eye, decides whether your ad reaches a real person in Leeds or a data-centre server pretending to be one, does not check anyone’s TAG status.
It isn’t part of the bid. And even if it did check TAG status, it wouldn’t have changed much as TAG certification is about ‘process’ rather than ‘outcomes’.
The registry doesn’t reliably say who’s certified
Meanwhile, the paper trail doesn’t inspire confidence. For a while, one major platform’s certificates were filed under the wrong subsidiary.
Another company kept a TAG seal proudly displayed on its own website for two years after TAG had stopped listing it as a member. A third had paid for renewal but was behind on its audit and simply vanished from the registry.
AI search is now compounding the confusion
When Google’s own AI search was asked who currently holds a valid TAG seal, it cheerfully reported that each was certified and in good standing. Even the robots can’t keep the story straight, which would be the single funniest fact in ad tech this year if it weren’t so sad.
None of this makes the people running TAG or the ANA the villains of the piece. Nor does it make the brands that trusted the seal naive. Quite the opposite: everyone here has been playing the same well-intentioned game, built for a slower, more honest supply chain than the one we have now.
TAG logged 43 complaints of non-compliance over four years and upheld precisely one. That is either the cleanest corner of commercial history ever recorded, or a system engineered to reassure rather than to catch.
Even the right to complain has shrunk: TAG’s rulebook once let any company file a grievance; the current version leaves the decision to open an investigation entirely to TAG’s own staff.
TAG’s brand-safety seal is at a record level of participation even as its fraud/transparency certificates shrink, suggesting the market isn’t rejecting third-party accreditation outright but is increasingly deciding which parts of it are worth paying for.
‘A racket’
The less comfortable, more interesting truth is this: fraud was never a battle you win once and then quietly stand down from. None of this is a new complaint, either.
Back in 2019, Dr Augustine Fou — the fraud researcher behind FouAnalytics — told The Register that certification “enables fraudulent companies to operate in broad daylight by paying the fee and waving their TAG seal around,” calling it “a racket that extorts fees from good companies that didn’t need to be certified in the first place, but get painted with the same brush as fraudsters”.
The people gaming programmatic supply chains are not lazy opportunists. They are well-resourced, patient, and increasingly armed with the same generative tools as the rest of us. Their sole aim is to make fraudulent traffic look, click and behave exactly like a genuine, moderately distracted human.
Old rulebooks, new enemies
Let’s face facts: an annual certificate, built on audited processes and not audited outcomes, was arguably out of date the moment it was published. Static rulebooks do not survive contact with adaptive (and morally bankrupt) adversaries, and it is unrealistic to expect them to.
Even the Media Rating Council found this out this year, quietly narrowing what it would allow anyone to call “brand safe,” in an announcement so understated it landed on a weekend with no press release attached.
None of that is P&G’s fault or any advertiser’s. Marketers did exactly what any sensible business does: they trusted a widely respected seal so they didn’t have to re-litigate the entire global supply chain, campaign by campaign.
The problem was never gullibility on the brand side. The issue is that certification, as a category, was designed to address yesterday’s fraud, is checked annually, and is based on samples rather than on what really happened to each and every impression.
Look at the evidence
Sadly, ad fraud, including its scope and scale, has only recently been revealed. It is a very unpopular topic, as the whole supply chain benefits from ad volumes. Being able to ‘hide behind’ what a leadership body says is best practice (even in the light of plentiful evidence to the contrary) is convenient.
So the answer isn’t a new initiative and standards body that criminals can spend the next twelve months working around. We need to stop leaning on certificates and start leaning on evidence: measuring every impression as it happens, rather than sampling a slice of it once a year and hoping it represents the whole.
Move on the criminals’ timeline, not the auditor’s. The industry doesn’t need a better rubber stamp. It needs to put the stamp down and start looking at the evidence.
Tags: #ad fraud #tag certification #google #the trade desk #ad verification
Marc Dhalluin is the founder of TruthsetsOnline, a digital transparency and ad fraud analytics platform. Marc has built, transformed, and rescued brands generating over $500 million in combined annual revenue. A longtime collaborator of fraud researcher Dr Augustine Fou, he now focuses on one thing: proving that genuine advertising reaches real people. Based in Los Angeles, Marc writes regularly on digital transparency, programmatic fraud, and what brands should actually be measuring.
Connect with Marc on LinkedIn or visit TruthsetsOnline.com
