With ad fraud anticipated to exceed $50 billion globally by 2025, the World Federation of Advertisers has issued its first guidelines to help marketers reduce their exposure to it.
Compiled in conjunction with the Advertising Fraud Council and Botlab, the guidelines have been designed to assist brands in taking practical steps to ensure that as little as possible of their advertising budget falls victim to ad fraud – which is currently second only to the drugs trade as a source of income for organised crime.
The report identifies four key areas of improvement:
1. People and technology: Brands need to develop in-house expertise to support vendor selection, work with cyber security partners to help understand common threats and demand full transparency of investment, including full disclosure of the websites being used to promote their products or services.
2. Education and communication: Brands need to set clear expectations of what they demand from their partners. They should set appropriate metrics that, where possible, relate back to business outcomes. They should also encourage open information sharing related to preventing ad fraud.
3. Standards: Brands should avoid run of exchange buys in favour of databases of safe sites. Advertisers that need to hit digital investment targets may have to accept that these will not be achievable without exposing themselves to high levels of fraud.
4. Governance: Contracts with agencies and vendor partners need to be revised to ensure that there are clear penalties for misallocating spend to ad fraud related inventory, where preventing it could be reasonably achieved. Those elements of the ad tech chain that have benefited from fraudulent activity in the form of commissions and fees should be requested to return them to the advertiser.
“Advertisers are the sole victim of ad fraud and the WFA wants to equip them with the tools to minimise their exposure,” said Stephan Loerke, CEO of the WFA.
“There is much that advertisers can do to improve the situation in terms of setting new standards, contractual changes and increased transparency, but ultimately behaviour change is required across the industry.”
Last month Santander’s chief marketing officer, Keith Moor, said persuading advertisers to take part in key industry committees tackling issues such as ad fraud, brand safety and viewability was like “pulling teeth”, and was contributing to ill-health in some areas of online advertising.
“The bottom line is, [clients] are the money,” he said. “We fuel the industry, so it’s entirely within our gift to help sort the problems we see in digital.”
Meanwhile, advertisers are expected to lose an estimated $7.2 billion globally this year as a result of ad fraud – while fraud, bots and poor viewability rates mean around 60% of digital advertising budgets are currently being wasted.
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