Fighting fraud requires more than just developing better detection systems for bots, writes VivaKi’s Marco Bertozzi – advertisers need to start looking much more closely at the quality of what they are buying and be willing to pay for it.
Dominic Mills was on to something last week when he described the toxic cesspit of online ad fraud, but he did not go far enough in identifying solutions and who is ultimately accountable for clearing up the mess.
The obsession with low cost creates a perfect environment for fraud and unsavoury, poor quality inventory to thrive. By allowing these conditions to persist, we are effectively turning the CPM (cost per thousand) into a CPN (cost per nada), because the impressions are not cheap. They are wasted.
The simple truth is that the advertising community needs to take a collective stand and stop buying poor inventory under the guise of performance. We can activate brand safety measures including proper verification of inventory, white-lists, viewability tech and tracking. However, doing so comes with a cost.
Click fraud has been one of the hottest topics of conversation in the programmatic advertising sector this year, with Google’s purchase of UK-based security specialist Spider.io just one of a number of industry moves underlying its growing importance.
It’s the buzz word de rigueur. However, fighting fraud requires more than just developing better detection systems for bots. Advertisers need to start looking much more closely at the quality of what they are buying and be willing to pay for it.
Even as we analyse viewability it is clear with some network and long-tail sales companies that sometimes only half the inventory can even be tracked to determine if the ads are in-view. Current thinking is to apply the same results from the impressions you can track to those that are dark. I disagree with this method entirely.
If a tracking company reports back that half the impressions can’t be tracked they should be put in the lowest quality bucket of inventory and valued as such.
At VivaKi we provide a rigorous vetting process called VivaKi Verified, which thoroughly evaluates media, data and tech partners to ensure that they meet our standards when it comes to brand safety, consumer privacy and client data protection.
As part of this, we aggregate safety signals from partners like comScore, Google, Integral Ad Science and Vindico. It allows our team to identify safe, quality inventory, and avoid the murky pool altogether. But as you might guess, avoiding click fraud, long tail, and non-viewed ads means a higher CPM.
As an industry, we can minimise the impact of online ad fraud, but everybody has to take a role in minimising the detrimental effects of the ‘bad internet’. Marketers need to demand quality. Auditors need to better understand the nature of performance in the Ad Tech environment. Agencies need to stop allowing their clients to throw money away on impressions that aren’t real.
Attribution, econometrics, understanding business impact will all go a long way to removing an obsession on lowest CPM. We have studies that show increasing conversions and reducing CPAs do not necessarily equate to lowering CPMs.
But this requires education and a collective desire to change the status quo. Advertisers should also be challenging media partners to show where they are advertising line by line. If you have to be transparent about the media placement, you are less likely to buy the long tail.
Metrics and standards aren’t there yet and adoption needs to happen on a larger scale, but the cost of viewable ad impressions will go up and we need to be prepared to pay them to ensure that better brand-to-consumer interactions are happening.
If the only metric is CPM, we are opening up the business to gaming the system and we all know who will be on the losing team.
Marco Bertozzi is president audience on demand EMEA and NA client services, VivaKi.
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