If Mark Zagorski is feeling the strain of more than six months of negative headlines, he’s not showing it. The CEO of DoubleVerify (DV), overwhelmingly the latest global player in the ad fraud verification market, has spent a week in Singapore to celebrate the firm’s regional expansion and new product launches, but despite the persistent jet lag, seems nothing but energised.
On a cloudless, early start to the day in the Central Business District, he tells Campaign about his optimism for social and connected TV, and why advertisers are worryingly behind the curve on the opportunities and challenges agentic AI will deliver into the market.
The clouds, however, are certainly present metaphorically. DV has faced significant criticism around the veracity of its advertiser reporting tools – and, by extension, the value it offers its clients – from research firm Adalytics. If not exactly battling for survival, it is certainly restating its relevance.
That DV has come out fighting is unsurprising, but it is important. The business’s fortunes and its ability to defend its reputation matter because its rise has mirrored that of the digital ad market itself, following it into an increasingly fragmented social media scene and thriving on the complexity of reporting across channels.
Zagorski’s pitch is that DV remains a hedge for advertisers seduced by the unverifiable promises of platforms. “I’ve never met an advertiser who said ‘I want more solutions…’. They want simplicity, [but] from Meta to Google, [the platforms] are all saying ‘just give us your money – we’ll do it all for you. Don’t worry about media selection or optimisation. They’re very successful with that narrative.
“Whether or not an advertiser should feel totally confident just giving all their money to a platform with a black box – that’s where companies like us can come in.”
Amid this environment, DV thrives on making sense of complexity. To its critics, its solutions are black boxes themselves, but Zagorski argues verification tools built into platforms are the real source of opacity in the market: “Those solutions are truly closed-loop solutions. Open web programmatic is one of the more transparent ways advertisers are actually able to spend their money these days, as opposed to ‘just hand me a dollar on platform X and I’ll take care of it. You just worry about the outcome. That’s where we play a role, in our relationships with the Metas of this world, because our solutions can be attached to the black box solutions to provide a greater level of transparency to what’s happening there.”
Objectively, this message is resonating. Revenue growth remains healthy and has actually accelerated year-on-year since Adalytics savaged DV in February, though the frailty of the wider ad market has depressed its share price. The business has diversified considerably, spreading its wings into every major territory bar China (“US ad tech companies do not have a good track record in China,” says Zagorski), has launched pre-bid tools for most social platforms and has been consistently acquisitive in its quest to push into post-bid performance beyond its roots in protection.
If DV’s biggest bet has been the need for better social reporting – its latest launch is an enhanced tool for use with YouTube – its fastest growing channel is Connected TV. Zagorski is “very bullish” on this market, albeit with caveats around convergence: “YouTube for many folks is television, if you watch it on a big screen in your living room, but YouTube is not all professionally produced, not all high quality and not always brand safe.”
He is optimistic, too, about the continued existence of the open web. “There’s still a robust open web, and I think programmatic is still the best way of accessing it and finding quality at a price that makes sense,” says a CEO appointed months into the Covid pandemic in 2020. “We’ve created this monolithic definition of the open web as being all the content that’s out there, and the answer is it’s going to exist in a different way.
“People still want to engage with content. There’s going to be a universe outside Google, Meta and social in which content is going to exist. But if we think of it as a never-ending universe of websites that people will browse, that’s not going to be how people engage.”
AI is, of course, changing DV’s methods – Zagorski talks about using predictive technology to help better categorise short-form video, without having humans watch it exhaustively – but he believes the industry more broadly is in a mixed state of readiness for the commercial implications. Meta recently announced nascent plans to mine gen AI conversations to target advertising across its platforms, but others are less prepared to jump in.
“I don’t think the main AI agents, with the exception of the platform companies like the Googles and Metas of the world, have really thought about that advertiser relationship and how important it is,” says Zagorski. “Google understands advertisers, but ChatGPT doesn’t and Anthropic and Perplexity do not.
“In the same way the social networks had to open up to independent assessment and verification, the chat engines will need to as well if they’re going to become commercial enterprises at some level.”
Zagorski talks about the need to “navigate a chat session with a consumer that may not spin in the right direction for you as a brand”. Most brands, he adds, are a long way from considering what this means – he gives the example of a financial services client that wanted, like many advertisers, to be removed from proximity to any gen AI content but soon found it had cut off a huge amount of its reach as a result.
Entering such uncharted territory, the question of whether brands can trust DV as a navigator becomes critical. Adalytics says ads are consistently being served to bots, even when they are identified as such, by DV and its rivals, Integral Ad Science and Human Security. It has cast further doubt on DV’s ability to flag adult, discriminatory and abusive content. DV is now suing Adalytics for defamation, and when pressed on the attacks, Zagorski will only say “you always have to look at the source”.
“Everyone wants to poke holes,” he adds, an extension of his previous line that DV is unpopular because it is a ‘referee’ in the market. “We’re open to that, in forms and in ways we think are collaborative and help contribute to the betterment of the ecosystem. But we’ve always stood behind our products.
“We are continually pushing our products to be better, and we welcome collaboration to do so. That is part of the evolution of any company. We’re not above acknowledging when there are issues, but we’re also going to acknowledge the fact we think we’re right on point and we’re doing the right thing.”
DV says Adalytics has consistently “misrepresented” how its technology works, as well as pushing back on the specifics of its claims around bot behaviour and verification. Zagorski says advertisers “continue to trust” the firm: “ We represent their best interests. We have no incentive to not ensure that we’re doing the job for them that we need to do and that’s what we focus on every day.
“We’ve been criticised as a company for having too many prohibitions and hurting news in some cases, but on the other side they’re saying ‘you’re letting too many things through’. At the end of the day, it’s the advertiser that makes the call, not DV, the advertiser that sets the dials, not DV. We ensure that what we’re delivering to them is the best solution that can deliver the best results for them.”
The coming dominance of agentic traffic must be a welcome distraction. Zagorski paints a proliferation of consumer agents as a Wild West for advertisers, who will need to be able to discern between malicious bots and genuine user’ agents.
Southeast Asia is another source of optimism. DV now has 120 people in the region and continues expansion here. Zagorski is heartened by how “positive” consumers are towards AI compared to North America and Europe. “This is a social- and mobile-first market. It means most advertiser engagement is going to happen against UGC, which means brand suitability challenges in some cases. It’s going to happen on a smaller device, so things like viewability become greater issues in this market. You have different dynamics that create opportunities and challenges, but it’s exciting because it’s so dynamic and so varied.”
He’ll be hoping such opportunities are more than just a financial fillip to DV – growth and dominance in new markets will restore its reputation as a digital gatekeeper and make the trials of 2025 a thing of the past. For now, the market waits to see if DV can weather its myriad storms.
