Everyone's Busy Looking Busy... But Actually Doing Nothing to Solve Fraud

But few are actually solving ad fraud.

I won't name the few individuals and the few companies that are actually doing this right, to shield them from retribution from the establishment - ANA, 4As, IAB, GroupM and the entity they formed, TAG. I've written about this before, so I won't repeat here.

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/what-establishment-wants-you-think-ad-fraud-ad-fraud-historian/

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/do-you-buy-industry-narrative-dr-augustine-fou-ad-fraud-historian/

To summarize, so you don't have to read the rest of the post:

1) 2014 - 2019 - while everyone was busy solving for "viewability" ad fraud flourished and grew larger. But an ad that is "viewable" by a bot, is still useless to #marketers' business outcomes.

2) 2018 - present - while everyone is busy solving for "brand safety" (and now "brand suitability") ad fraud will continue to flourish and grow larger. But one ad screenshotted next to a terrorist video pales in comparison to the billions that continue to be lost to ad fraud.

I am not saying that viewability and brand safety don't matter. They do. But #marketers and the industry trade associations should still be prioritizing their efforts better - solving ad fraud first; if we stop funding the bots and fake sites, the problems of viewability and brand safety also diminish.

This is because the fake or fraudulent sites use code to trick viewability measurements - so they are the only ones with 100% viewable ads 100% of the time. This siphons money away from good publishers, whose sitewide average viewability is 66% simply due to page geometry (2 ads above the fold and 1 ad below the fold naturally). Note the Newsweek example where they used code to alter the viewability measurement so all their ads appeared to be viewable, even when they were not. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/newsweek-ibt-malicious-code-ad-fraud

Additionally, fake, fraudulent, or UGC (user generated content) sites are the ones that brands should avoid. That's where most of the brand safety issues exist. And since these fake sites have little human traffic, they purchase all their traffic. So that's where most of the fraud issues are too (fake traffic). In both "brand safety" and "IVT detection" the detection technologies are easily tricked by the fraudsters. I've written about this as well, so I won't repeat here. Check the following links, if you want to see examples of the thousands of places where you can buy traffic for your website, that gets by fraud detection; and examples of where brand safety detection tech simply can't detect stuff properly.

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/does-ana-know-anything-ad-fraud-ad-fraud-investigator/

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/brand-safety-gone-mad-bad-just-plain-wrong-ad-fraud-historian/

And bad brand safety tech is harming good publishers - the word "blood" should be on a medical journal site; the word "shooting" could be perfectly brand-safe, as in "shooting star" and "sexy outfit" has the word "sex" in it so it is marked as not brand safe, when it is actually fine. Yeah, that's how sucky most brand safety detection tech is. And good publishers lose ad revenue when ads are blocked from their site, due to this bad measurement.

https://digiday.com/media/keyword-block-lists-still-cause-headaches-publishers/

So, to summarize for those who got this far -- #marketers should solve for ad fraud first, before viewability and brand safety, because 1) reducing fraud will also reduce the fake sites that trick viewability and brand safety detection tech, and 2) viewability and brand safety detection tech is sucky, so you can't solve viewability and brand safety anyway.

And finally, fraud detection tech also sucks, especially the black box ones, so you should look at the data more closely yourself. And do what Kevin Frisch did -- find the fraud on a massive scale by using common sense and asking more questions about the data. He found that the mobile exchanges that sold him app installs were falsifying the records of where the ads were placed, and also fabricating placement reports in their entirety to continue the cover-up, until he exposed it.

https://twitter.com/abhart/status/1227603447987556353

If you need the analytics tools to gather data so you can look more closely yourself, I've released #FouAnalytics for everyone to use. Read more in the link below.

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/fouanalytics-alternative-google-analytics-fraud/

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About Me:  “I consult for advertisers and publishers who actually want to know the truth and who have the courage to do something when they find ad fraud. I am not a fraud detection tech company that relies on fraud to continue. I show my clients the supporting data so they can understand and verify for themselves what is fraud and what is not fraud. If they agree, they can take the necessary actions to eliminate the fraud while campaigns are still running, rather than post-mortem fraud reports and trying to get their money back.” 

#FouAnalytics details here - https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/fouanalytics-alternative-google-analytics-fraud/

Follow me here on LinkedIn (click) and on Twitter @acfou (click)

Further reading: https://www.slideshare.net/augustinefou/presentations