Ad fraud: Why money and accountability are holding back progress

Opinion

We have the technology to identify sites engaged in illegal activity and to cut off their funding if we wanted to, but there are two things that are holding us back: money and accountability.

According to White Bullet, brands spent more than £30m advertising on illegal streaming sites and apps in the UK over the last 12 months. Millions more were spent funding domains engaged in other types of illegal activity or were lost to fraud. With UK advertisers spending £26bn on digital advertising in 2022, and with a notoriously opaque programmatic marketplace, it’s little wonder that criminals were ready to cash in.

There are many issues facing the digital advertising industry right now, but as my UK Stop Ad Fraud coalition partners have noted in this series for The Media Leader, ad-funded crime is one of the biggest. At Sky, we have more than a passing interest in the topic — as one of the UK’s biggest advertisers, as a media owner and as an investor in original content.

While much of what I want to discuss can be applied to the marketplace as a whole, there are few better examples of the damage ad funded crime is doing to the industry than its impact on digital piracy.

Globally, piracy is a multibillion-dollar industry and there are really only two routes to market: a subscription-based model, where users pay a small fee to access a wide range of content; or an ad-funded model, providing consumers with free access to infringing content. The latter is more prevalent which, combined with a lack of transparency in the market, presents a real opportunity for the sophisticated and organised criminals involved in running pirate operations.

What can be done?

The question is, do we have the necessary means to tackle ad funded crime? I’d argue that the answer is a resounding yes. We have the technology to identify sites engaged in illegal activity and cut off their funding, if we want to.

So why haven’t we? There are two things that could be holding us back: money and accountability.

Every programmatic impression placed on a site, whether legitimate or not, makes the site owner money. However, a percentage of that cash also goes to the ad tech provider who placed it there. And while we can argue that some brands will end up on these sites inadvertently, there’s no shortage of advertisers willing to look the other way if they think they can reach a relevant audience at a lower cost.

Every part of the ad ecosystem needs to be accountable, but all too often we see responsibility being shifted from one part of the chain to another. Calls for the tech giants to be more transparent and proactively exclude illegal sites from monetising their activity are often rejected as they try to place the onus on brands to activate better safety controls.

Others argue that accountability sits with ad tech. While it’s hard to argue with the notion that all digital inventory sold via reputable companies should meet a minimum brand safety floor, if you’re not willing to take steps to protect your brand, do you really expect ad tech companies to?

The way forward

We find ourselves at something of a crossroads. We can all agree that our industry needs to do more to ensure it’s not funding crime. But it seems we’ve not yet agreed on the best way to do that.

Towards the end of 2022 the UK Stop Ad Funded Crime coalition brought together key companies from across the media industry to identify the issues at hand and agree a way forward. This was an important step, and one which could drive real change.

At Sky, we try to be the best partner we can be. We take responsibility for where we are spending our money, insisting on things like exclusion lists and ad verification tools and doing our best to ensure our budgets don’t fund activity that is illegal or not aligned to our brand.

We also push for transparency. We want to know what we’re buying, where we’re buying it, and at what cost. And we encourage our partners to take the same approach.

But ultimately it comes back to accountability. To clean up the digital marketplace, we all need to be accountable. We need to come together as an industry, make our stance known and uphold our standards. And we need to put our money where our mouths are.

Allie Wootton is Sky’s group lead of anti-piracy advertising and payment strategy.