Adalytics is best known for muckraking reports about failures in ad tech, digital media measurement and brand safety, including a recent report that found brand ads supporting child porn distribution, which prompted a probe by U.S. senators. But the research firm has kept identities of its paying clients under wraps—until now.

Quad and its Rise media agency today are announcing a partnership in which Quad will use Adalytics’ automated log-file analysis, custom research and other measurement tools on behalf of clients.

Also read: How Adalytics is infuriating programmatic ad players

The arrangement is unusual in that it doesn’t include a clause, common in agency deals with measurement and analytics vendors, that strictly prevents Adalytics from taking issues it discovers directly to Quad clients.

“They do a lot of open-signals intelligence sorts of investigations,” said Joshua Lowcock, president of media for Quad. “So if they find something, and if we refuse to act on it, absolutely” they can take it to clients.

“This is about behavior change, transparency, accountability and setting a new standard for this industry,” Lowcock said.

Adalytics’ habit of taking research findings direct to the public and brand marketers in reports based on publicly available data has infuriated some agency and ad tech executives, who prefer problems be privately addressed via ad verification and media companies.

Lowcock said Quad was attracted to Adalytics in part because of who the company doesn’t work for. Adalytics only accepts work from the buy side, including brands and agencies, not from media or ad tech companies.

“With other providers, there are mixed incentives,” Lowcock said. “If you’re working both sides of the fence, there’s no incentive to hold anyone accountable.”

Adalytics helps shed light on an industry that’s “basically murky,” he said. “Nobody likes the level of disclosure that’s required to actually improve the industry. There are a lot of other options available that are, air quote, industry certified. But I have significant doubts about the integrity of industry certification, because they’re very much a pay-to-play mechanism, whereas Adalytics publishes its results transparently. You can repeat their methodology if you want to do the analysis yourself. So that’s very appealing.”

A Quad statement said the company will become “among the first in the industry to implement protocols and exclusion filters that directly reduce ad delivery to obvious non-human traffic across media-buying platforms” using Adalytics services. “The company intends to work with Adalytics to enhance media transparency by transforming how brands evaluate and optimize their digital media investments.”

The “obvious non-human traffic” reference comes amid apparent research by Adalytics regarding ads being served to declared bots and spiders, such as the crawlers that Google uses to catalog the web. Preventing such “general invalid traffic” or GIVT is the industry’s low-hanging fruit when it comes to ensuring inventory quality, since such bots are declared on a list maintained by the IAB, not deliberately obscured.

Adalytics hasn’t released the report yet, but DoubleVerify referred to its impending release in a blog post last month, criticizing Adalytics’ work.

The most recent Adalytics report, citing ads served on pages with child sexual abuse material, was based largely on ads found to be served to the declared bot of Urlscan.io.

"We at Adalytics believe that Quad has a proactive rather than reactive stance on media quality issues, actively looking into details that may pose reputational risk or undermine the effectiveness of clients’ media investments," said Krzysztof Franaszek, founder of Adalytics, in a statement. “Together we hope to further optimize media performance and give advertisers a holistic understanding of who and what their digital ads are funding.”