Secrets From The Digital Whistleblowers - The Ones Your Agency & The Government Don't Want You to Know.

The whole country is feeling the pinch, money (again) is tight, households and businesses are balancing tight fiscal decisions around utility bills, food shopping, paying rent/mortgages, rising prices, taxes, and for many looming redundancies.

Indignation and anxiety is everywhere!

We're vocal about all manner of things from Brexit, migrant boat crossings, the spiralling cost of living crisis, and dodgy MP's.

When we see financial waste of our taxes and abuses by those deemed to be making decisions on our behalf we want to do something about it.

They say that "actions speak louder than words" - it seems that it isn't the case when it comes to ad fraud with taxpayers funds.

The recent pandemic saw unprecedented levels of support handed to businesses and employees. As I write this article at the end of March 2023 the second drafts of the history of Covid-19 are now being published, showing the harm done to good government, and the cost in government spending.

Estimates of the total bill top ￡400bn, or more than ￡6,000 per head. BBC.com

The UK's main spending watchdog has taken a close look at ￡13.1bn procurement of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). It found the fast-track access to contracts, for those with good connections to government, saw billions spent without safeguards and much of the PPE supply being unusable.

So far, the clawback of fraud is a tiny fraction of what the UK government fears.

The Conservative peer?Michelle Mone?and her children secretly received ￡29m originating from the profits of a PPE business that was awarded large government contracts after she recommended it to ministers, documents seen by the Guardian indicate.

Lady Mone’s?support?helped the company, PPE Medpro, secure a place in a “VIP lane” the government used during the coronavirus pandemic to prioritise companies that had political connections. It then?secured contracts worth more than ￡200m. The Guardian

Indignation indeed - yet businesses sit on their hands when it comes to ad fraud and outdated verification tools.

And now this; The UK Government could spend up to a maximum of ￡930m over the next three years on media.

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy will have its proposed maximum media-buying budget increased from ￡9.65m to ￡36m, while the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities will go from ￡4.7m to ￡21.6m.

Online advertising has seen consistent growth and is forecast to account for 74.3% of all spend this year (2022), in comparison to 73.5% in 2021. While growth was recorded across all media, online formats – notably search, display (including social) and classified – grew the most in absolute terms.?IAB.UK

The latest dataset suggests the UK's ad market will grow by a further 4.4% in 2023, to a value of ￡37bn, a 1.0 percentage point downgrade from AA/WARC’s April forecast.

Digital ad fraud is the single biggest threat affecting advertisers in every industry, who spend enormous sums on digital advertising.

Globally, digital ad spending has passed the US$500-billion mark annually.

These dollars are replenished every year, making it a very attractive soft target for criminal organisations, large and small. Ad fraud also poses a significant threat to the brand reputations of organisations. For example, when their ads appear on unsavoury websites they wouldn’t typically choose to be associated with.

If you got this far into this article you are either learning how to regain control of your ad spend, or wanting to verify that what your being told (and paying for) by the media agency is in fact verifiable!

Are you still using legacy fraud verification vendors? Of course you are.

And you're probably paying for those vendors several times over in the same campaign without knowing it. Time to save some money and upgrade your verification tools.?

Advertising Whistleblowers:

In recent months, a half dozen advertisers have shared with me that they have run campaigns without these legacy fraud verification vendors (either blocking or monitoring) and saw NO difference in quality, or outcomes. Fou Analytics

I am sure that no matter how scandalous these revelations are, you still can't dump these vendors and run your digital campaigns without fraud verification, right?

The painful reality is that existing anti-fraud solutions have been unable to keep up with the exponential growth of this illicit industry. And these verification vendors are all used by the same agencies that are spending government (tax payer) funded budgets, and most likely the same ones used by your company.

The stats, research, and verification do not lie - 50% - 75% of digital advertising is going directly into the pockets of organised crime.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal in?March 2022?and?May of 2022?"Ad-Tech Firms Didn’t Sound Alarm on False Information in Gannett’s Ad Auctions."

[These] firms had more than enough information to detect the error for over nine months," but they still failed to detect it, notify their own customers, and stop the IVT.

This is what their customers paid them to do - stop the IVT. When confronted about these failures to detect basic invalid traffic they gave excuses and wrote blog posts to misdirect (e.g. "these were technically not fraud").?

So if the UK government are spending circa ￡930m of our hard earned taxes on advertising that will include digital media then why are you not shouting from the rooftops?

If your website is your #1 revenue source you want to:

● Spend your marketing budget to attract real humans

● See real humans visiting your website

● Encourage real humans to fill out your lead generation forms

● Convince real humans to buy your products

● Get rid of all bots, fraudsters and other malicious actors

In order to do this at scale, you have to spend your marketing budget on campaigns attracting real humans!?

Time to upgrade your tools -- from legacy fraud verification vendors to something better.

You are welcome to try FouAnalytics, at no cost, next to these legacy fraud verification vendors and see what they missed.

The fraud and IVT that they missed is the fraud and IVT that you missed. You are not to blame.

Those legacy fraud verification vendors were the tools you had in the past. There are better tools and better analytics now. Time to upgrade your tools so you can "see Fou yourself." When you can see better, you can do better (digital marketing).

If you would like to run a 'FREE' and independent audit please drop me a DM and we can set up the trial - if your agency say they are on top of it ask them 'what's to lose by performing this audit"

Your welcome!!