This week's review of ad fraud and quality in the digital advertising space.
Pixalate this week released the Q2 2018 Programmatic Quality Report: North America. This comprehensive analysis of traffic quality details the state of invalid traffic (“IVT”) across desktop and mobile devices, including current IVT trends within mobile apps. The report also contains an update on the state of viewability in the programmatic marketplace.
Pixalate has released updated invalid traffic (“IVT”) rates from the United States from May 2018 — and our analysis reveals that ad fraud remains a large problem for both web and in-app advertising. Mobile in-app is the riskiest, and "the problem is extrapolated because marketers have a general lack of visibility into in-app advertising," the blog reads. "So few companies are able to detect, monitor, and prevent ad fraud in-app, which creates an atmosphere ripe for exploitation."
"Like any ordinary business, fraudsters flow to where the money is," wrote eMarketer. "And because advertisers are putting more of their budgets into video, fraudsters are flocking to the platform, as demonstrated by a recent experiment by The Guardian."
The article continued: "The Guardian and its research partners found that when ads.txt filters were applied to their ad buys, there were no discrepancies between what they bought and what ended up coming back to The Guardian. But when ads.txt filters were not applied, 1% of display ad spend and 72% of video ad spend went to unauthorized programmatic platforms."
This week, the Brand Safety Institute (BSI) launched "with the mission of helping advertisers, agencies and publishers get smart about managing brand safety issues," wrote AdExchanger. The article added: "BSI plans to accomplish its goal through a certification program designed to train and accredit ad industry execs on the finer points of brand safety, such as ad quality, how to vet partners, ad placement and content analysis and understanding ad fraud and malware."
"The revised OpenRTB 3.0 spec released Tuesday makes major changes to the programmatic standard to stamp out bad ads and fraud. The IAB Tech Lab’s new spec is now open for public comment for 60 days," reported AdExchanger. "[B]ad actors exploited the [older] standard’s holes, leading to domain spoofing, location fraud, in-banner video and other issues," the article noted.
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