CTV bot fraud 'surged by 69%' in 2022

Connected TV (CTV) ad fraud driven by bots rose by 69% in 2022 compared to the previous year.

That is according to a new report from digital media measurement, data and analytics platform DoubleVerify (DV), which also revealed it identified three times as many CTV ad fraud schemes and their variants as they did in 2020.

DoubleVerify believes the risk of ad fraud to unprotected advertisers is significant. Attempting to quantify the fraud rates protected and unprotected advertisers face, DoubleVerify found that campaigns from the former group experienced a fraud rate of 11.2% while the latter experienced a rate of 0.6%, a difference of nearly 18x.

“When verification is turned off or not applied, an advertiser becomes vulnerable to the swings in quality caused by unpredictable news cycles and increasingly sophisticated fraud schemes,” says Collette Spagnolo, Vice President of Marketing Analytics at DoubleVerify.

“Moreover, always-on protection helps the industry maintain a common and consistent gauge of media quality everywhere, as verification techniques evolve to encompass emerging channels for content consumption. Having coverage, protection and insight into all channels is critical.”

The company says the rise in bot-fraud comes as investments in CTV continue to grow. According to the report, connected TV consumption and quality verification rose by 252% in the UK year-over-year.

Independent ad fraud researcher Dr. Augustine Fou has previously cast doubt on the accuracy of reporting done by legacy ad fraud detection companies. Last month, he told The Media Leader that current fraud detection technology “cannot reliably detect that CTV ads ran at all, let alone ran on an actual TV.”