Taking Back Control Of Your Advertising Budgets Will Be The Best Investment In 2023 - Here's How.

Who wouldn't want to recover up to 75% of the 'paid media' advertising budget?

Rhetorical i know, but if you read and act on this article I can pretty much guarantee to deliver you a minimum of 50% of that ad spend back - at no extra cost to you!!!

READ ON....

Are you a CMO, CFO, or the CEO?

I ask the question because you have a fiscal responsibility to not only be aware of fraudulent activities within your business, your also legally obligated to prevent them.

Over the years as Marketing Director/CMO/CGO I have happily handed over ￡100m+ in paid media budgets to external media buying agencies, and just like you I have always been interested in the vanity metrics that shows us were doing things right - right?

How much connected TV (CTV) fraud is there? Most of it.

Don't read on, if you don't want to be disillusioned about how magical CTV advertising is. Advertisers are making the exact same mistake they made 10 years ago shifting digital ad dollars into programmatic display, then programmatic video, then mobile, then mobile app - Why?

Because this is where the advertising budgets are being spent.

So, just like you I have sat in that CMO chair handing 6 figure budgets to media agencies assuming their on top of the fraud. The reality is that the fraud detection tools they used yesterday haven't kept up with the big league money spinning fraudsters of today.

Tools like ‘DoubleVerify’ or 'Integral Ad Science' (IAS) are no longer adequate, since the bots and fraud are advanced enough to avoid detection. Lots of bots remove ‘detection’ tags so they can operate in stealth mode.

And those that are out there are focused on detection NOT prevention - when it's gone it's gone, and let's be honest your advertising budget is most definitely stacked in favour of the media agency and adtech.

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.”?

John Wanamaker (1838-1922) was a very successful United States merchant, religious leader and political figure, considered by some to be a "pioneer in marketing”.

He is credited with coining the phrase?“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half”. - A quote I'm pretty sure has been heard by many in marketing over the years.?

If your a regular follower and reader of my blogs, post, and articles on LinkedIn you will see that for the last 10 years I have been leaning into the ongoing debate around marketing effectiveness in the age of social media, along with the inescapable fact that due to GDPR, Ad Blockers, and Ad Fraud the digital marketing landscape has become quite challenging.

In fact I became so pissed off with the intrusive programmatic ad tech sector I decided in 2015 to invest a 6 figure sum to try and provide a user experience that was focused on putting you and me (consumers) in charge of how we interacted with content that sparked our curiosity - something that happens when we read or watch any form of media content.

Whilst this was extremely well received and delivered a 1000% increase in dwell time for a major TV network for reasons I can't go into in this article I lost the business and my investment shirt with it - but it's never deterred me from trying to solve the problem.

'Juniper' research ?suggest that ad fraud is set to rise to circa $100 Billion by 2023.?There are others?and myself who believe that even that is just the tip of a very large fraudulent iceberg, an iceberg that continues to help the ad industry implode in on itself.

Fraudulent publishers:?Fraudsters that claim to publish CTV (connected TV) ads while instead intentionally manipulating the attribution flow to steal ad budgets.

They don’t display anything legitimate, they just manipulate the attribution technology to make it believe that they did display an ad.

We recently did a non-scientific poll on Twitter to get some ballparks about what people think and do with respect to CTV apps.

I first asked "how many CTV apps are there?" How many do you think exist? The answer may surprise you - more than 60,000. I then asked "how many CTV apps can you name in 1 minute?" The answers to the right show that most people can name between 1 - 9 CTV apps. Dr. Augustine Fou

This happens to be the same as when I ask how many sites do you visit repeatedly every day or how many apps do you use repeatedly every day. It's 9 or less.

Of course, you use some long tail sites and apps once in a while, but most humans have a handful of apps they use every day, repeatedly.

"Common sense will tell you that if a human has not heard of a CTV app before, they won't be using it to stream, let alone stream SO much and SO many hours that the CTV app can be selling millions of impressions." source Dr. Augustine Fou

Fraud on CTV is not fundamentally different to any other form of technical ad fraud and there are essentially two ways that fraudsters are able to manipulate attributions in this context.

1. Engagement fraud:?Fraudsters manipulate an ad engagement, click/scanned QR code, or impression to steal an attribution from organic and other legitimate sources. It’s important to note that the end user, the device, and post-install activity are all real; the only fabricated thing is the engagement. When subjected to engagement fraud, campaigns may exhibit high levels of in-app activity and show positive ROI thanks to organic users that have been poached.
2. Spoofed users: Where everything—the engagement, the install, and any post-install activity—is fabricated. Unlike engagement fraud, spoofed users don’t represent any real users or user behavior. Fraud schemes under this umbrella focus on mimicking real user behavior by using real devices to proxy their fabricated traffic. In creating legitimate looking ‘spoofed’ activity, fraudsters can steal your CPM, CPI, and CPA campaign budgets with simple script automation if you’re not protected against SDK spoofing.?

The forecast from Juniper also suggest that in what is still the wild west of digital advertising most of the increase in fraud will occur when ad tech and programmatic is fed into our Smart TV devices, which by the way has already happened........

The?top three ad fraud cases in 2021 ?were, unfortunately, all related to CTV and an estimated?US$140 million in ad spend was lost ?to fraud during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic on the channel, making ad fraud is still a major concern for any advertisers running ads on CTV. This is large in part due to the channel’s structural issues, which can put fraudsters at an advantage.?source Adjust.com

Here's a few ideas that your in-house marketing team should be doing, not just handing it to the external media agency.

• Ask for line item details.?If you only see aggregate numbers on a monthly or daily basis, you’re not going to see fraud as easily. For example, when an ad slot opens up, the site will announce it’s open for bidding, and the algorithms that represent ad buyers will bid, with someone winning. Win rates are usually about 10 percent. If you’re seeing win rates of 90 percent, something is wrong. Legitimate publishers can’t let every site win. Marketers can turn off that fraudulent website and not buy from it anymore.
• Examine bids won vs ad impressions served.?For each bid won, an ad impression should be served. Look for discrepancies. Compare your DSP reports for bids won, by domain, to your ad server reports, by domain. Look for data discrepancies where the impressions served is far lower than the bids won, by domain. Identify domains that have greater than 10 percent discrepancy and study them further; then turn them off if you agree it is fraud.
• Look at your ad serving volume by hour.?Be sure quantities on your ad server report are reported by hour, and look at whether all of the volume is spent in the first hour or during sleeping hours. If that’s taking place, you have no impressions left for the day and your budget is wasted.

Time to take back control:

I've teamed up with 'Fou Analytics' to help you solve this issue and I want to offer a 30 day free trial. Advertisers are invited to run a no-cost pilot with FouAnalytics to measure up to 1 month or 100 million impressions, whichever comes first.

This is done by copy and paste of a FouAnalytics tag into one or more of their programmatic campaigns.

The data from FouAnalytics will show them insights that are not available from legacy fraud verification vendors already in use.

The advertisers will find out their true exposure to the many forms of ad fraud currently not detected or reported by existing fraud detection vendors.

PLEASE NOTE: For obvious reasons your incumbent media agency won't be overly keen for you to do this as we can guarantee to uncover a minimum of 50% ad fraud that is currently going undetected by legacy systems they are using.

If they're tell you that they're convinced that they are already measuring this then ask for the audit report and ask "what do you both have to lose by obtaining an independent audit?".

***For your ‘free month’ no obligation trial drop me a DM quoting promo code ‘Renmus’.

Or you could carry on as you are wasting circa 50% -75% of a budget that could help recruit or retain new employees, or even utilise it to further 'grow' your business.