Andy Cocker is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of buy-side exchange trading specialists, Infectious Media (@infectiousmedia).

2010 could be as significant a year for digital media trading as the 1986 Big Bang year was, when electronic, screen based financial trading first took hold in the City of London. Exchange liquidity is improving by the day, Real Time Bidding (RTB) protocols are being adopted, and everyone is building or licensing a Demand Side Platform (DSP). If you're reading this, the chances are you've already bought in to the main, well documented benefits of dynamic real time media trading. But with such great efficiency rewards on offer, it's sometimes easy to forget, that their are equally great associated risks. It's essential that advertisers are aware of these, and their exchange trading partners have process and technology in place to mitigate them.

'Risks' come in many different forms, ranging from 'content/contextual' based. Ie what content/context types are suitable to for an advertiser to appear next to, to 'impression and click fraud' based.

If you are buying at scale across thousands of fragmented sites, the majority of which you have no direct personal sales relationship with, it's more important than ever to check up on what you are buying! Just because your DSP dashboard tells you that you ran 500m impressions across 1000 sites yesterday, how can you be sure your ads didn't appear next to questionable content, or below the fold, or even appeared at all?

As with many things in this brave new world, it all comes back to the big D - Data.

In the same way that a DSPs 'bidder' relies on a layer of data to help it decide the value of impressions to individual advertisers, so too 'risk management' and 'verification' data layers are essential in the buy side filtration system. Having access to data points, that allow you to score ad impressions based on 'risk' is arguably as important as having access to advertiser conversion data. For the last 5 or 6 years, media buyers have looked to IASH to 'process audit' ad networks, because that's the best option they had. Real Time Bidding protocols now allow smart buyers to manage the risk audit themselves at scale in a more automated way.

It's exciting, and unsurprising then to see another cluster of specialist businesses emerging to service the whole area of risk management. Whilst the concept is nothing new, (some ad networks have been applying these techniques for some time), what is new is their adaptation to the real time exchange environment. AdSafe, Click Forensics, AdXpose, Double Verify are just a few of the players in this space, offering various smart measures and techniques to improve advertising accountability, transparency and control. The type of services on offer are: Impression Fraud Analysis (Botnets, spiders, faked user-agents, open proxies, known offender lists, etc), placement verification, content audit, contextual audit and Pro-active real time impression rejection.

Whilst 'risk management', is a critical component in the DSP technology stack, lets not forget the importance of the human touch and good old fashioned local market knowledge. Here at Infectious, we employ a manual 5 stage risk mitigation protocol to all campaign set up, which runs from the client briefing stage, though network construction, to final delivery verification. This is in addition to the data driven filters built into our Impression Desk DSP.

Of course, every advertiser and every brand is going to have a different attitude to risk. A gambling advertiser will most likely have a much higher 'content' risk tolerance than a high street retailer for example, but it's important to establish these risk profiles before any trading takes place.