Trust in Ad Tech – Advertisers Have to Demand Accountability in Ad Verification

As the digital marketing industry has advanced in recent years, ad verification has become an integral tool in marketing strategies. The challenge however, is how can advertisers truly be sure their ad verification is accurate, and their budgets are safe?

The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) allegedly reported a growing crisis in the advertising sector in a conversation with key industry players. With the risk to advertisers rising, they now must re-examine their marketing strategies and find out just how protected they truly are.

Advertisers should be fully aware of what traffic is passing through their systems and where their advertisements are being shown. If advertisers don’t look critically into their ad verification, their ads could potentially be seen alongside inappropriate or illegal content. Industry bodies have maintained that ad fraud in the form of Invalid Traffic (IVT) has been below 1% for the past 3 years. However, it’s possible this figure is misleading advertisers.

The Flawed 1% Narrative

The idea that ad fraud only impacts 1% of advertisers’ impressions has been echoed for years, but this figure is only based on overly narrow sampling. The digital advertising landscape is complex, and isn’t represented in the specific, certified environments used to back up the “under 1%” claim. Typically, only around 1 in every 1,000 impressions is sampled, leading to a significant portion of fraudulent activity going unnoticed.

By taking the 1% fraud benchmark at face value, advertisers are being lulled into a false sense of security. The fraud landscape has developed rapidly, with threat actors constantly creating more sophisticated methods to siphon away ad spend. Tactics such as device farms, bots, and fraudulent publishers have become increasingly popular and difficult for legacy tools to detect. Industry body reports have a narrow scope, and they are leading advertisers to underestimate the true extent of the problem.

Search Engine Conundrum – Conflict of Interest in Ad Tech

Multiple anti-trust investigations have highlighted a new problem – a conflict of interest between search engines and the advertising industry at large. Verification companies and ad platforms appear to be beholden to search engines in order to be “certified” to provide brand safety. This is not idle speculation either, there have been very public arguments with social platforms about limits on their ability to honestly report brand safety risks to clients.

Popular search engines control a significant portion of the global ad market, meaning verification providers face a moral dilemma – be honest auditors and hold incumbents to account or make compromises due to undue influence and market power of those that control the market. This dilemma explains why reports about regulators looking into verification and asking the hard questions are unsurprising:

• Are verification companies acting in the best interest of advertisers, or are they too compromised by their alliances to be effective?

• Are there distribution and access agreements in play?

It’s time for advertisers to reflect on if their verification strategies are working as intended, or if they have been influenced by outside bodies.

Why Advertisers Must Demand Better

Ad spend is forecast to reach almost $328 billion in the US and Canada alone according to Statista. Advertisers are pouring billions into their digital campaigns every year, but they are still relying on verification systems that could be deemed unreliable. To truly address fraud, advertisers have to ensure their strategies go deeper than surface-level sampling.

Advertisers should ensure they are provided with more than just “sampling” of impressions. But transparency and accountability across every impression. Advertisers should recognise that the metrics they are currently receiving may be inaccurate. Ignoring ad fraud can have negative effects ranging from wasting budget, stunting growth, and undermining the trust in digital marketing altogether.

Moving Forward: Shifting the Focus to Real Accountability

For the digital advertising industry to drive future growth, trust and accountability are a necessity. As the inherent conflicts between brand safety and fraud detection come to the surface, the industry is set for a wake-up call. Powerful institutions like the US Government invest millions into their advertising and have a very personal interest into understanding where exactly their funding is going.

Marketers can no longer set up their fraud detection and hope for the best. Ad verification has to evolve to stand a chance against increasingly sophisticated fraud tactics, it’s not enough to only detect samples after the damage is done.

It’s time for advertisers to be critical and ask the hard questions: Is 1% fraud really the whole story? And are your ad budgets truly being protected?

The landscape of ad verification is changing and will change for the better. But advertisers need to be at the forefront of that change, demanding better, smarter, and more in-depth analysis to ensure that they get what they pay for.

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Read full article in Performance Marketer Magazine.