fraud

FORT LAUDERDALE – If you want to price digital advertising appropriately, don’t just look at the rapidly-growing supply of inventory, look beneath the surface for what is really real. That’s according to veteran ad exec Irwin Gotlieb, the chairman of ad group GroupM. “Supply measured without taking in to account things like viewability and bought […]

COLOGNE — As an acronym, it doesn’t seem to make any sense. But “IVT” (that’s “invalid traffic”) is now the new industry jargon for what had been called “non-human traffic”, the scourge of online ads being triggered to defraud advertisers using fake views. The Media Ratings Council this summer put together guidelines for tackling the problem, […]

By now, you might have already heard plenty about “bots” defrauding advertisers. But what are bots and how do they actually work? “Bots are not big server farms, they’re individual computers like your own that have been infected by some malware that was wrongfully downloaded -it might be sitting dormant until the botnet operator decides to […]

PHOENIX — Over the last year, the reality that many web ads are viewed not by consumers but by automated scripts, or are otherwise out of view, has gained visibility. Some estimates on the topic gloomily suggest the sky is falling over digital advertising. But that’s far from the truth – at least, if you […]

FORT LAUDERDALE — Over the last couple of years, the digital advertising industry has woken up to the problem of fake ad views, in which ads served by a publisher are not really seen by genuine consumers. If you thought “premium” publishers are off the hook, think again… “When we look at the top top […]

COLOGNE — Ad buyers are increasingly calling for outright and advance understanding over where they place ads. But, in the data frenzy, you can know too much, suggests WPP’s Xaxis chairman David Moore. “There’s a lot of misconception about transparency,” he tells Videology CEO Scott Ferber in this video interview at DMEXCO for Beet.TV. “A lot […]

CANNES, France — It seems like it was only a few months ago that the topic of video ad fraud cast a long shadow on the digital advertising sector. Now everyone is running around trying to eliminate the dark arts. And one tech vendor says those arts could already be extinguished before 2014 is done. […]

The reality that many of the online ads paid for by advertisers are not really viewed by human users – or, worse, fraudulently viewed by artificial bots – has risen up the industry’s agenda of late. ComScore chief research officer Josh Chasin characterizes it as “arms race”: “You have the good actors working to eliminate […]

Does the adage “you get what you pay for” ring true when it comes to online video advertising? Although advertisers are often keen to drive down the prices they pay in a world now threatened by fake views, TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson warns that logic could be detrimental. “We get a lot of information requests […]

Who’s to blame for the rising problem of online ad fraud? Ad tech vendors aren’t the frauds themselves – but they should accept responsibility for keeping customers happy, says one platform boss. “We take the burden,” says says Brett Wilson, CEO of video ad tech vendor TubeMogul. “Anything you buy that isn’t what you think […]

Over the last couple of years, media measurement’s big titans have both rolled out new ways to quantify online video consumption for advertisers – Nielsen’s Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) and comScore’s Validated Campaign Essentials (VCE). Who will win? That’s the wrong question to ask, says an exec from the comScore side. “The market has come to believe […]

“Don’t panic!” That is Internet Advertising Bureau US‘ research, analytics and measurement SVP Sherrill Mane‘s advice to an advertising industry growing alarmed by the rise of apparent fraudulent viewing of their ad buys. “The distinction between (‘fraud’ and ‘viewability’ is not being made correctly,” Mane tells Beet.TV. “The danger to the reputation of the industry […]

Recent revelations that many online ad impressions – perhaps 40% – are prompted by internet bots defrauding ad buyers has spooked the industry. Now Google wants to go to war with the bots. “The surge of non-human traffic … is really taking the entire industry by storm,” Americas media platform sales head Jay VanDerzee tells Beet.TV. “This, […]

Advertisers won’t get to correlate ad spending with actual business outcomes until they give intermediaries real-time sales data, says one major-agency ad exec. Asked if advertising measurements like CPMs should be replaced by client-oriented metrics like actual sales, DigitasLBi media activation head Adam Shlachter agreed: “What we should be focusing on is the outcomes we want […]

Unscrupulous publishers are causing advertisers sleepless nights by automatically playing video ads despite being out of human view, “below the fold” of web browser windows. So could mobile provide safe sanctuary? “The nice thing about the walled garden of iOS, and sometimes android as well, is that you cannot really run things ‘below the fold’,” […]

The realization, by advertisers, that many of the views they buy in video are faked by nefarious bots is serious – but not necessarily as serious as The Wall Street Journal recently suggested, according to one ad agency exec. “It was a little sensational,” VivaKi Audience On Demand video director Cheryl Stump says of the […]

Over the last year, video ad measurement firms have started reporting around 40% or 50% of video ad impressions may not really be viewed by consumers, instead invoked by fraudulent publishers looking to sell inventory. But comScore’s chief research officer Josh Chasin says the problem is over-blown. “You’ll see headlines, ‘X% of all video inventory […]

Non-human traffic was recently described as programmatic advertising’s “dirty little secret“. Integral Ad Science reckons nearly a third of impressions to be suspicious – up six-fold since 2011, according to comScore (via Adotas). AOL’s programmatic video ad tech platform Adap.tv wants to nip the problem in the bud. “We are fighting fraud that is generated by […]