Diageo, the company behind popular alcoholic beverage brands including Smirnoff, Baileys, and Guinness, has announced that it will pull back ad spend in areas of digital media over concerns surrounding ad fraud, brand safety, and transparency.

The company has laid out a strict set of requirements in order to better control its better ad budget, Videonet reports. These rules include zero tolerance of ad fraud, strict brand protection, a minimum requirement of viewability of 70 per cent, viewing environments must comply with legal purchase age, transparent pricing models, and a measurement of viewability.

“Publishers are on the front line in the battle against advertising fraud,” said Chris Liversidge, managing director of digital marketing agency QueryClick. “They have a duty to educate both brands and agencies on programmatic processes to ensure transparency. However, brands can take steps to protect themselves too. First, where possible, they should separate their programmatic campaigns so they are given the consideration – and performance measures – their growing size warrants. Secondly, they should unbundle their agency relationship from the programmatic platform, to enable them to seek out independent providers that offer true transparency and protection from the risks of current programmatic campaigns.

“In doing so they will not only significantly reduce their exposure to waste and damage to their band reputation from fraud, but also start to see programmatic begin to deliver on its promise.”