Dec 1, 2021
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In the crowded digital advertising landscape, marketers have their work cut out for them focusing on brand success and campaign strategy—so dealing with online advertising fraud is the last thing any brand team needs. So how do marketers deal with it without compromising their campaign performance, ad spending, and overall brand image?
In the crowded digital advertising landscape, marketers have their work cut out for them focusing on brand success and campaign strategy—so dealing with online advertising fraud is the last thing any brand team needs. How does CTV ad fraud happen? And how do marketers deal with it without compromising their campaign performance, ad spending, and overall brand image?
The good news is there are safe, premium opportunities to protect brands from ad fraud and provide marketers tools to ensure every impression reaches a real, targeted audience. By understanding what causes fraudulent CTV advertising and leveraging trustworthy resources to mitigate outside intervention, brands can feel confident in their protection against unwanted activity.
With the advent of multi-platform streaming in the 2020s, many users became aware of shell accounts or bots beefing up the stats on their favorite social media profiles and video-sharing site content. These accounts deceive viewers with thousands, sometimes millions, of fraudulent clicks, views, and followers, often for financial gain. But did you know that advertising fraudsters use similar strategies to generate fake impressions? This is Connected TV (CTV) advertising fraud.
CTV fraud involves using deceptive tactics to generate revenue from advertisers by falsely inflating video ad impressions. One notable ad fraud tactic is server-side ad insertion (SSAI) spoofing, where fraudsters distribute ad requests from fraudulent data centers masquerading as CTV devices. Using fake or unverified inventory means viewers don’t see ads, and unprotected advertisers lose an astounding amount of revenue [1].
In 2023, Double Verify and Roku TV discovered CTV bot fraud jumped by 69% in 2022 and that CTV ad fraud has tripled since 2020 [2]. With a surge in CTV spoofing and ad placement fraud, marketers need ad fraud prevention aid more than ever—but where to begin?
In the ad space, wherever the money goes, the opportunity for digital ad fraud follows. The growth of streaming TV content among audiences and investment by media ad networks has made CTV a prime target for fraudsters recently, presenting new opportunities to siphon money from unsuspecting marketers. Despite the ongoing threat of ad fraud, marketers are not predicted to shy away from CTV. According to eMarketer projections, CTV will become increasingly attractive to advertisers and ad spend will increase to nearly $100 billion in 2027 [3].
In 2020, Moat made headlines by uncovering StreamScam, the largest-known CTV ad fraud operation uncovered to date, which exploited CTV ad insertion technology, deceiving advertisers and spoofing more than 28.8m U.S. household IP addresses to trick buyers into thinking their ads were being served to real households. Similar schemes could become more common as advertisers turn to cheaper, less trustworthy buying options amid skyrocketing demand for CTV inventory.
Currently, most CTV inventory is bought and sold directly or through private marketplaces (PMPs), which makes it nearly impossible for fraudsters to spoof impressions. However, while ad fraud rates are highest on open marketplaces, fraud can also happen within PMPs.
In a complex market fueled by ever-changing technologies, marketers and ad networks can stay vigilant and take certain steps to protect digital ad campaigns, brand, and budget.
That’s where Digital Remedy’s Performance CTV solution comes in: Here are five steps to help brands prevent and fight ad fraud.
The critical first step is to be fully aware of the logistics of CTV and the potential consequences involved with online advertising fraud. CTV ad fraud succeeds by going unnoticed; a threat in plain sight. The increase in demand and prices for CTV inventory has primed fraud potential because of:
With this in mind, ad networks and agencies should be extremely diligent when it comes to the media partners they choose to work with and where their ad spend goes.
When it comes to media inventory, you really do get what you pay for. CTV is still relatively fraud-resistant if advertisers stick to direct media buys. CTV-focused supply-side platforms have taken many steps to prevent fraud from flowing through their pipes, while premium content providers have begun to offer greater transparency in paid ad buys and measurement. Premium content identification through third-party tools and solutions can help advertisers navigate available inventory options.
Working with reputable sources of inventory from the start is a strong preventative step for brands and agencies. Risking spend with a potentially disreputable inventory source could open your brand up to the possibility of CTV fraud, waste precious ad spend, and lose out on the ROI impact your campaigns deserve.
While fraud detection safeguards have steadily been in the works—the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has an authorized digital seller function (ads.txt) for CTV—widespread adoption could take a while. Initiatives like ads.txt and app-ads.txt have increased transparency in the supply chain and many reputable publishers limit the number of authorized resellers with which they’ll work.
Transparency into where ads are served is critical to ensuring they are being served in the right place. Marketers can even employ ad fraud detection companies and software that helps them detect click fraud and other suspicious activity via detailed reporting capabilities.
New technologies and methodologies have created new benefits into contextual solutions. By layering brand safety and contextual relevance at the content level, advertisers can deliver their messaging via highly relevant ads. Content-level contextual categorization relative to ad placements creates an extra layer of fraud defense and has the primary benefit of helping brand campaigns reach more relevant users.
As a marketer, the ability to detect, fix, and prevent fraudulent activity as soon as possible is crucial to staying vigilant. In-depth campaign performance insights into where, when, and who your ads are being shown provide the necessary data to ensure your advertising campaigns stay on track. Digital marketing tools with highly customizable, granular data tracking not only benefit your own strategic narrative but are key to keeping your ad dollars away from scammers.
As CTV fraud increases in scope and sophistication, it is critical for marketers to work with media partners that have the experience, knowledge, scale, and ability to identify and block new threats as they emerge.
In the fight against fraudulent practices, Digital Remedy has established strong relationships with the best industry leaders to protect our clients against monetary damages (revenue, CPMs, etc.) and—perhaps more importantly—loss of trust and reputation with real users.
These partnerships utilize advanced anti-fraud technology to ensure our clients’ ads are served by real publishers, shown to real people, and reach their target audiences. “Digital Remedy partners with MRC-accredited verification partners, such as Protected Media, to ensure all of our OTT/CTV inventory sources are high and premium quality and invalid ad traffic (IVT) free,” says our VP of Media Buying, Kevin Jones. “We continually work with our verification and inventory partners to identify suspicious activity, root out new methods of IVT, and stop ad fraud at the source. By integrating Protected Media’s innovative CTV cybersecurity ad fraud technology into our Performance CTV solution, we ensure every impression Digital Remedy serves is validated and provides the highest possible level of brand safety for our clients.”
Learn more about our Performance CTV platform and how Digital Remedy reduces the risk of ad fraud while helping our clients reach their intended audiences through access to premium inventory.
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