‘Ad fraud is like a virus – you can inoculate yourself’ but publishers must ‘do their homework’, says BBC Worldwide’s Tom Bowman
Ad fraud is a “virus” media owners and buyers must work hard to “inoculate” themselves against or face dire consequences, according to BBC Worldwide’s senior vice president of sales operations and commercial production Tom Bowman.
Speaking on the ‘War on ad fraud’ panel at Advertising Week Europe in London today (23 March) alongside IAB’s head of data and industry programmes Steve Chester, Bowman said the onus is on publishers to “do their homework” when it comes to safeguarding their sites against malicious attacks, adding that some remain “badly set up” so can be vulnerable to it.
He cited a recent report which highlighted that premium publishers sites are “seven times” more likely to be susceptible to ad fraud than people might think, adding “why do they attack [premium] publisher sites? Because that’s where the money is”.
“But it's also because a lot of these publisher sites are badly set up, haven’t got the right systems running on their sites, they haven’t done their homework , and leave it to someone else to worry about," he added.
Steve stressed the importance of separating the good non-human traffic, form the bad. “Google bots and spiders for example are necessary for it to index the web, but then there is also the malicious non-human traffic which is people going out of their way to commit fraud on the advertisers. But there needs to be a good understanding of what constitutes non malicious and malicious, and it’s not all bad,” he said.