
Bot-generated fraud on digital advertising will waste $42 billion by 2022, according to Jupiter Research. A shocking sum. Our guest, Dr. Augustine Fou, explains why and how ad fraud is perpetrated, and what can be done about it. Listen in to learn how we marketers must change our thinking about ad metrics, and update our media buying strategies altogether.
Cyndi Greenglass: In the last 10 years, we have moved from human-to-human ad networks to programmatic ad networks. This created the opportunity for ad fraud. Marketers have been focused on spending all the money we're given for digital media, and we're relying heavily on vanity metrics so we're exacerbating the problem with that fraud. Did I explain the core situation here for our listeners?
Dr. Fou: Yes, that's a really great way to summarize it in a nutshell. I've been observing this industry for many years, and in the early days of digital advertising, the advertisers—the buyers of the ad—would go to real publishers. But in the last 10 years, the buyers no longer have to go to the publishers to buy the ads because the idea is that they can now place their ads across millions upon millions of sites by buying through an exchange very much like Wall Street. Wall Street connects the buyers and sellers of shares of stock, and the programmatic ad exchanges now connect the buyers and sellers of ad impressions. When you disassociate the buyer from the seller, you now have the possibility of hundreds of thousands of fake sites.