FRAUD IS WORSE THAN FORVER BECAUSE NOBODY CARES?
It's hard to believe, but Gannett, the publisher of USA Today committed enormous fraud on their advertisers, placing ads all over the internet in places their advertisers did not agree to. Gannett claims they only found out about this after a March report in the Wall Street Journal. Earlier this week The Journal revealed that more than a dozen ad-tech companies
failed to detect this, despite having all the information needed to do so.
Major brands like Sears, Nike, Adidas, Ford, State Farm, Starbucks, Kia, Marriott, Capital One, American Red Cross, and Spotify were involved in this, all of them not questioning how badly this is happening.
According to the experts, this literally affected thousands and thousands of advertisers and potentially tens of millions of dollars of ads who were being stuck with fraudulent advertising placement and may never get refunded. No one seemed to have a clue, making this even worse: including every single third party verification program that claims to detect fraud.
I have to believe that either the company they hired to detect fraud was incompetent, or as many have suggested, there is no reason for these companies to actually attempt to catch fraud as the cash rolls in.
Additionally, no one is asking the right question: why did Gannett even have access to all those "unapproved" sites in the first place? This means they have likely been using other sites, less than "quality" sites all this time to run their ads because they don't have enough of their own fraud.
This means they KNEW what they were doing, and they knew this was happening.
If you've been following me for the last 22 years, I've shown fraud in the industry, left and right -- and notice that many companies only do as much as they are expected to do, and almost never try to go above and beyond to really prevent fraud.
Why should they? As Augustine Fou points out, they have no reason to actually care since everyone is making money. It's the same issue as it was decades ago.
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Expert Insight
with Augustine Fou
Top Digital Fraud Expert
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Let’s do some thought exercises around the programmatic media that you’re buying. The following thought-starters are going to be mind-bending and thought-provoking. Hopefully you will keep an open mind, as you try to wrap your head around what may be mind-blowing, head scratchers.
Advertisers have been addicted to programmatic media for the last ten years, because of the enormous scale, cost efficiency, and high performance. The large quantities of ads comes from bot activity, fake sites, and fake mobile apps. The low CPMs are due to fake sites selling ads at low prices because they have no costs for making content. The high clicks are from bots, programmed to click on the ads to create the appearance of performance.
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ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW, CONDENSED
1. According to the results of BDEX, up to 25% of all mobile advertising IDs (MAIDs) sold in the U.S. data market are invalid. After analyzing more than 1 billion device identifiers sold in the U.S., BDEX found that 21% of hashed emails (MD5s) are linked to more than 10 MAIDs, which indicates potential nonhuman behavior. Further, 2% of consumer IP addresses and 1.1% of email MD5s
sold in the U.S. are invalid.
2. Why aren't advertisers catching the fraud? (Some don't care) Because they’re not even looking at the right places. I’m going to tell you my hypothesis based on my experience. So they would need to run their JavaScript and detect the page USA TODAY and then cross reference it to the domain that was passed in the bid request.
They clearly are not doing that right. It’s so trivial. It’s so easy. They have code on the page that should be doing that. Their whole point is that they would find these mistakes or deliberate fraud and all that kind of stuff , but they’re failing at even the most basic stuff. so you know the March article from Wall Street Journal. Was that OK? They missed it. Today’s article says they had code on the page. They shouldn’t have missed it.
3. Programmatic media-buying continues to experience transparency gaps that could lead to wasted ad spend and raise brand-safety red flags. More than half (52%) of marketers surveyed by Winterberry Group last fall said they expected to increase their spending on contextual targeting over the next 24 months specifically to deal with ad fraud, because ad placements are informed by factors like keywords and topic.
4. Affiliate Marketing Continues to have ENORMOUS Fraud issues. Affiliate marketing is neither as easy nor as safe as proponents initially anticipated. Most advertisers struggle to find reliable affiliates who deliver new customers in desired
quantities, in exchange for reasonable compensation. Meanwhile, despite the promised alignment of incentives, bad affiliates can exploit shortcomings in tracking and attribution to claim commissions they have not fairly earned. Informed by these problems, affiliate marketing raises longstanding questions of judgment, partnership, and incentives reminiscent of decades of media-buying.
5. Interceptd stats show that in Q4 2018, device farms accounted for 25% of ad fraud, incent abuse for 20%, bots/emulators for 18%, SDK spoofing for 13%, click spamming for 9%, click injection for 8%, and other sources for 7%
6. A study by Forrester found 69% of brands spending $1 million per month reported that at least 20% of their budgets were being lost to digital ad fraud; yet 70% of these companies reported that they were actually planning to increase their advertising budget.
7. Some fraudsters try to claim credit for “displaying” an ad when, in reality, they’ve done no such thing. Using strategies like ad stacking and pixel stuffing, fraudsters can claim credit for “showing” ads to website visitors when the visitor really had no chance of seeing or clicking on the ad. Ad stacking is the practice of hiding ads on a page to maximize the number of impressions while saving on the site’s available “real estate.” The
ads on the page are all stacked on top of one another, occupying the same spot. In this scenario, only the ad on top is visible, so it’s the only one with a chance of performing. Every other ad is buried below and can’t be clicked on, so they produce no results despite generating an impression
8. From sexual content to misleading financial product ads to outright fakes, Google stopped 3.4 billion ads that violated the company’s policies last year, according to a report. As a result, Google blocked 5.6 million accounts of alleged advertisers.
9. More than half (55 per cent) of Instagram influencers were involved in some form of social media fraud and fakery. A new study by HypeAuditor also found 45 per cent of Instagram accounts were fake.
10. LinkedIn making major changes to feed, worried about quality. With LinkedIn becoming more and more like Facebook daily, with polls and link bait being used to promote profiles, LinkedIn finally decided to do something about it. Any "encouraging" actions such as likes and comments will result in being pushed down in feed, as will
clickbait and polls that seem to have no purpose.
11. Yelp Revenue was $277 million, up 19% from $232 million last year. “We were obviously pleased with strong advertising demand against the backdrop of a very complex macro environment,” Yelp Chief Financial Officer David Schwarzbach told MarketWatch. He claims that advertisers are finally getting the point and using to reach their highly affluent audience. Unfortunately, also highly annoying.
12. More on the Roblox Complaint that they are targeting kids illegally: Truth in Advertising, a nonprofit organization that aims to protect consumers from “false advertising and deceptive marketing,” filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission alleging that Roblox has “completely shirked its responsibility” in following advertising laws on the kids gaming platform. The full complaint names several major U.S.-based
corporations, including Netflix, Nike, Hasbro, and Mattel, as companies that have games on the platform that use deceptive marketing practices. Pay attention to this: "in game advertising" is going ot be huge and how the FTC handles it will make a difference in its growth.
13 . No Really: People are scared of the Metaverse. Perhaps its bad sci-fi movies, or just generally stupidity, but a recent survey of more than 2,500 U.S. adults, people are currently more likely to fear the metaverse than be excited about it. The survey, which ran from March 23-25 and was conducted by Axios and market research software company Momentive, asked respondents if the idea of the metaverse
made them “more excited or scared about the future.” I'm more scared of people at this point.
14. Using spoofing tactics, bad actors can gain access to CTV servers, disguise bots as real viewers and even purport to run ads when no ads are present. Advanced TV advertising company MadHive finding that as many as 20% of streaming video ad requests are purely fraudulent. "Complete viewability sounds promising on the surface, but actually poses major questions from a fraud perspective.
For example, nefarious players could implement server farms and create bots that simulate someone watching a CTV ad." ( Ken Harlan)
10. The best method to minimize fraud is to set requirements for inventory partners. Marketers should use accredited third-party verification partners and work with inventory that allows pixels for tracking. A third-party test and review of inventory sources is a step in the right direction to minimize fraud and build greater confidence in ROI.
11. Companies that eliminate fraud immediately are tracking outcomes in real time and have real people monitoring everything. Many will use lead generation on the back end to have metrics to ensure the people are "real" also. Nothing can replace a real person with intuition in these cases.
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The Watercooler
Impress your Co-Workers with these useless facts about marketing
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What is the first instagram post?
The first Instagram post was a photo of South Beach Harbor and his dog at Pier 38, posted by Mike Krieger at 5:26 PM on July 16, 2010.
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All About Us & Advertising
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ADOTAT.com is the product of over 20 years of online marketing publications and articles by Pesach Lattin & many more experts that have contributed!
Want to advertise? Contact pesach@lattin.us
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