Best Practices - Network Hosted Advertising
Many sites and networks have faced bad press and the wrath of advocacy groups for their advertising practices, such as which ads appear, where they appear and the data collection practices of the advertisers.
Network Hosted Advertising Best Practices:
- Understand your user demographics.
- Determine and articulate advertising policies and practices for your network.
- Determine and articulate a policy regarding use of user-generated content (UGC) in advertisements and inform your users about practices and what choices they have.
- Conform privacy practices with advertising practices and accurately describe these practices in the privacy policy.
- Create a guide for sponsors, advertisers and promotional marketing relationships that accurately articulates your advertising policies and consider making that available to your users.
- Review your fan and brand-protection policies for consistency with your advertising practices.
- Create an abuse-reporting process for users to identify offensive ads, and provide information about your policies and how to report advertisements that violate your policy and what will happen when they are reported (to manage expectations).
- For non-COPPA sites and services, review ads to screen out those directed to preteens in the US or set policies that are agreed to by your ad providers or servers relating to preteen ads.
- Don’t permit advertisers to deploy technologies that track users without providing notice of those practices.
- Test any downloads offered by advertisers or sponsors on your network for malicious code and spyware.
- Police use of your brand by your advertisers.
- Identify all advertisements, advertorials and sponsored editorial content as “ads.”
- Comply with behavioral marketing best practices, as adopted by the FTC, state regulators and the NAD.
- Require indemnification of compensated endorsers and reviewers.