The point of adverting is to get people to experience a message and, hopefully, to somehow act on it. Advertising has crossed paths with every media channel in existence, and now it maintains an increasingly dominant presence the digital sphere as well. As more people turn their attention online for news, entertainment, and social interaction, it is becoming a territory that customer engagement marketers are eager to explore.
The entire point is negated, however, if people do not actually see or hear the messages. This has been a challenge for customer engagement professionals for decades. But now the digital realm is presenting an entirely new problem, and that is ad fraud. Because online, ads might be “seen” but those “eyes” might not be coming from anything human.
This topic was explored in a keynote presentation titled, “(Un)Truth in Advertising,” during Ad Tech last week in San Francisco. After a new report conducted by White Ops and ANA predicted that advertisers would collectively lose $6.3 billion to non-human traffic this year alone, the conference brought together a group of professionals to discuss how computer bots can deflect advertising revenue and how marketers can help safe guard their digital investments from such attacks.
The panel consisted of John Montgomery, COO of GroupM Interaction North America; Vejay Lalla, Partner in the Digital Media, Technology & Privacy Group with Davis & Gilbert; Michael Kelly, Sr. Media & Consumer Communications Manager at the American Licorice Company; and Suzanne Sypulski, Director of Advertising Operations at The Wall Street Journal. These professionals offered insights on how brands can help safeguard themselves against this growing problem.
The panel offered a few more surprising statistics to further frame the problem. According to ANA, nonhuman sources are responsible for 11% of all display ad views, 23% of video ad views, and 52% of all third-party source web traffic. Kelly literally referred to these “attacks” as a new form of organized crime.
“The criminal syndicates that operate these bot-nets are specifically going after the highest cost per thousand (CPM) inventory, so video makes a very natural place for them to focus energy,” said Kelly. “For source traffic, there is less transparency in the contracts that we sign, and we are not able to get access to the transparency around what traffic is being sourced from where, and the verification levels placed on that traffic from the publishers. So, we as marketers, need to really apply ourselves to become technologists to be able to understand how these malicious agents are working against us, how it affects our media channels, and how to mitigate that risk.”
One of the big ideas stressed by panelists was to work toward developing industry-wide standards that could combat these threats as they arise. As new technologies like mobile are advancing and becoming increasingly entwined with everyday customer experiences, tracking and measuring threat levels is now crucial, especially because the sophistication of criminal bot technology is also rapidly advancing in tandem.
“Mobile is a great example of where the bots will go to next,” said Montgomery. “As mobile video takes hold and the CPMs start going up, mobile will be a bigger target. We are increasingly getting a handle on mitigating desktop video and display, but if you think about the huge volumes that are going into mobile right now, it requires more attention. And we are behind in measuring the level of fraud on mobile right now.”
The fraud will simply follow the dollars and digital advertisers need to become more aware of the problem before they can hope to find a solution. First and foremost, there is a huge amount of education that needs to be done, which can serve as one of the primary safeguards of the future.
Panelists emphasized diversification as another major protection again these threats.
“Similar to putting together a financial portfolio that is diversified to mitigate risks, we can work with our agencies to put together media plans and media mixes that are diversified,” said Kelly. “We can find that balance between the need to get the high performance ad sent out versus the need to get very targeted. We can direct messages to where there is less risk of this fraudulent activity taking place.”
This is becoming a very serious concern for marketers. If digital ad fraud continues unabated, trust among the advertising clients will eventually erode. Until these issues are properly addressed, there will be varying degrees of fear about transferring further revenue into this arena.
The potential opportunities with digital could be very lucrative, but many potential advertisers will still be reluctant to participate in this new medium until, as Montgomery put it, “the Wild West is tamed.”
About the Author: Mark Johnson
Mark is CEO & CMO of Loyalty360. He has significant experience in selling, designing and administering prepaid, loyalty/CRM programs, as well as data-driven marketing communication programs.