Protecting the House: How Magnite Thinks About Trust When the Whole System Is at Stake

Magnite is one of the largest independent sell-side advertising platforms in the world, and consistently ranks as one of the top SSP performers in the Confiant Malvertising and Ad Quality Index (MAQ).

In an industry where trust is increasingly fragile, Magnite holds itself to a higher standard. The team lives by an old Under Armour slogan: "We must protect this house,"  which means staying committed to doing what's right for the brand and, most importantly, for the end users who pay the price for bad actors. This proactive stance allows Magnite to innovate in fast-growth areas like CTV and retail media while maintaining the trust that makes premium supply valuable.

We spoke with Brian Buttray, Senior Director of Demand Quality at Magnite, to understand how this commitment shows up in real work.

The consequences of low-quality or unsafe ads ripple far beyond the publisher. How does Magnite approach its role in protecting the integrity of the ecosystem, not just your direct customers?

We’ve long recognized how low-quality ads can ripple across the entire digital economy. That’s why the company has focused on protecting the integrity of the ecosystem, not just our direct customers.

As an original member of TAG’s (Trustworthy Accountability Group) Board of Directors, and an author and champion of Buyers.Json, we’re committed to transparency and accountability across the industry. Beyond our direct work, we’re dedicated to sharing threat information widely with seasoned security professionals to benefit everyone.

As CTV, retail media, and AI content scale with greater complexity, how do you balance innovation with ensuring the right guardrails are in place?

Our approach focuses on staying close to Magnite’s philosophies and processes. We use what we already know to evaluate and build onto our solid foundation, ensuring we can scale safely. We do this through long-standing processes like vetting prospective clients and vulnerability testing. It also means collaboration by innovating with the right partners, like Confiant.

What investments or trade-offs has Magnite made to consistently deliver safer, higher-quality supply?

It really comes down to making hard choices. Beyond it being simply the right thing to do, we also want to provide an environment where both media owners and buyers can transact with confidence.

We’ve seen what happens to companies that fail to address quality issues over time. Partnering only with legitimate media owners and buyers is critical to our long-term goals of providing best-in-class programmatic infrastructure.

What do you see as the next frontier of risk for digital advertising? Where is the system most vulnerable to fracture?

Transparency and trust are foundational, and we see the next frontier of risk in how bad actors will evolve to exploit and erode them further.

Our primary focus is on the maturing CTV space, where vulnerabilities are emerging across VAST/VPAID wrappers and ad markup, creative execution environments, and SSAI/CDN ad asset manipulation. In CTV, ads delivered through VAST/VPAID and stitched into streams through SSAI create opportunities to inject malicious payloads such as redirects, phishing overlays, or manipulated manifests. These attacks can drive fraud, data harvesting, malware distribution, and revenue diversion.

As a collective, it’s critical that we make meaningful security investments to preserve the integrity, trust, and premium experience of connected TV in households worldwide.