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Digital ad fraud: It's time to rebuild trust in the industry

By Timur Yarnall, SVP of Corporate Development

November 7, 2014 | 4 min read

Having spoken this week in New York at IAB Ad Ops, Timur Yarnall, comScore SVP of corporate development, offers his views on the need for the digital advertising industry to deliver trust around viewability measurement.

Timur Yarnall, comScore SVP of Corporate Development

The digital advertising Display LUMAScape is a popular cliché in our industry, but only because it perfectly underscores the reality and complexity of ad campaign delivery today. The advertising landscape has evolved to become extraordinarily complex, crowded, and – for lack of a better word – messy. We’re awash with data coming from disparate measurement systems, there’s a lack of consistency from platform to platform, and there are few, if any, industry-wide controls in place capable of keeping fraudsters from inserting non-human traffic (NHT) or fraudulent inventory into the supply chain.

At the IAB Ad Ops event in New York this week, the majority of the discussion centered on the notion of transparency in digital advertising and defeating fraud. The industry is clearly galvanized around the desire to clean up the mess. At comScore we are doing our part by working to deliver our clients with “Human GRP” metrics, which is to say that we are deploying technology to validate that a digital ad is (1) viewable and (2) delivered to an actual person.

The call-to-arms at last year’s event was around viewability, and a year later it’s clear there has been significant progress on this front. Although viewable impressions are not yet used as currency between buyers and sellers, the industry is steadily moving in that direction. This year’s topic shifted focus to ad fraud and the various challenges in addressing the problem of NHT. For example, Andrew Casale of Casale Media mentioned that ad networks and programmatic platforms need to have better controls around who is actually receiving payments, not just who is buying. Joe Barone of Group M described his team’s challenge as delivering campaigns for clients that are “delivered to our target demographic… viewed by a real human being… within a safe viewing environment.”

During an afternoon Town Hall session on Online Ad Fraud facilitated by comScore, a broad group of industry participants discussed challenges facing buyers, sellers, and platform providers regarding this issue. While digital ad sellers (sell-side exchanges and publishers) are often thought to benefit from increased inventory due to NHT, the consensus was that honest, high-quality publishers are clearly harmed by the issue of ad fraud and could benefit by differentiating their “certified” inventory from low quality un-certified inventory available on some exchanges.

Ultimately, making digital advertising usable and transactable comes down to delivering trust to buyers. Brands and agencies want to be able to trust not only that their ad is delivered to an actual person on a post-buy basis, but they also want reasonable assurances that the inventory they’re buying is going to reach an actual human and meets their pre-defined expectations for quality.

By delivering this trust all of the legitimate players in the ecosystem win, and they win at the expense of the bad actors. Marketers gain the ability to measure the actual impact of their ad campaigns without results being diluted by ads that never had a chance. And better measurement provides greater justification to shift budgets to digital. Validating impressions also creates scarcity that brings balance to the digital advertising supply-and-demand curves, which should result in higher CPMs for publishers whose inventory actually performs. It also better aligns the incentives of both advertisers and publishers with that of consumers, which promises to build a better digital experience that respects the user and delivers a higher quality rather than higher quantity of ads.

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