Campaign has awarded AwesomeAds the prestigious Breakthrough Technology Award for kid-safe programmatic advertising.
In our mission to build tools and technology which enable a safer internet for children, the first area we focused on fixing a few years ago was digital advertising. A murky place on a good day, all adtech was fundamentally designed for adults i.e. it captures as much personal information as possible in order to display a tailored ad. In fact, adtech is one of the largest infringing factors for COPPA and GDPR-K: adult adtech captures tens of millions of pieces of personal data on children and shares them with hundreds of DMPs around the internet.
We changed this completely with AwesomeAds, building the world’s first ad server designed solely for the requirements of the kids digital media space.
Not only does it ensure that kids’ personal data is never captured (it operates on a contextual-only basis), AwesomeAds also ensures that all ad creative is reviewed to ensure appropriate for the young audience in question (and the associated standards country by country).
We also added programmatic filtering, allowing brands to buy through platforms like Rubicon and AppNexus (AwesomeAds filters out all trackers to ensure every ad request is completely compliant). Connected to our AwesomeAds Marketplace (consisting of fully reviewed kids publishers), it allows brands to responsibly and safely reach hundreds of millions of kids each month.
This level of recognition seemed improbable when we first dreamed up the idea of making programmatic advertising 100% kid-safe. As you all well know, programmatic advertising was not built with kids in mind. Collecting data is everything, creative controls are non-existent. The ecosystem was built for speed & efficiency, safety wasn’t even an afterthought – it was an irrelevance.
Today, we’ve managed to allow brands and advertisers to reach kids programmatically without ever having to worry about safety or creative appropriateness – our solution takes care of that. Our vision as a company is to power the kids digital internet, and this technology is an important step towards achieving this.
The Campaign award highlights how AwesomeAds has become the standard for COPPA (and now GDPR-K) compliant advertising.
Feel free to get in touch if you have questions.
Chris Williams is Head of Product for AwesomeAds at SuperAwesome.
