MMA Global APAC Identifies Compliance Safety as New Digital Marketing Pillar

MMA Global APAC, an industry organization for digital marketing, has highlighted a critical emerging need for marketers: Compliance Safety.

This new concept aims to complement existing brand safety tools by focusing on the ability to quickly and scalably evaluate ad inventory and data sources for core compliance metrics. This is becoming increasingly important due to evolving privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.

The organization argues that current solutions are insufficient for verifying whether ad campaigns run on truly compliant sites. While marketers can screen for unsafe content and manage personal data, there is a lack of readily available data to confirm that ad inventory adheres to official consent frameworks.

"It is trivial to insert a consent flag in a bid, but it's generally not an audited process," MMA states, drawing parallels to location data spoofing. They note that adding such flags can increase bid prices (CPMs) without genuine compliance verification.

MMA urges industry stakeholders to develop continuous and granular monitoring of publisher policies, consent mechanisms, and other factors that reduce risk in digital advertising. The organization predicts that Compliance Safety will rapidly evolve into an industry standard, much like brand safety has over the past decade.