'People turn a blind eye to it' - experts debate how to tackle bot traffic and the phantom web
Bot-generated traffic and the issue of the phantom web is an ongoing hot topic and one which experts believe must be tackled swiftly to ensure client trust isn’t eroded.
The Drum spoke to industry experts from companies including Videology, Starcom Mediavest Group (SMG), Project Sunblock and Mediabrands to discuss how the issue is harmful for advertisers and how to combat it.
For some time many have been aware of the issue but turned a blind eye because reporting total reach rather than actual reach has been too hard to resist, according to Videology chairman and chief executive Scott Ferber.
“Some people just turn their eye to it – they know it’s there but because they can claim it as real traffic it makes their numbers look good. But that’s not going to help us – we need everyone to know that the real metric is real traffic not total traffic,” he said.
The onus is on the industry as a whole to tackle the issue and ensure they are using the right kinds of technologies, which are available, to filter out the bad traffic, according to Ferber.
“The whole idea is to verify the actual human on the other end. I don’t need to know it’s ‘Scott Ferber, with all that personal information, I just need to know it’s a human being. There are technologies that can do that – it’s an obligation of the industry to use it,” he added.
SMG’s president of global operations John Sheehy agreed the phantom web is causing problems for advertisers, and that people use bots to “spur on” their usage figures, but that with the ever-increasing focus on programmatic trading it is necessary to tackle the issue swiftly.
“It’s in nobody’s best interest – ours, clients, vendors – to have this issue floating about, so it is something we are talking about across all organisations and with our clients,” he added.
To see the full interviews watch the above video.