Back by popular demand is my 3 Category Title!
Fraud Avoidance Recommendations
A recent study by MBD Cybersecurity recommended that marketers take the following steps to help reduce ad fraud:
- Know that fraud detection doesn’t actually detect fraud
- If asking to validate your Impressions feels like a shell game, it probably is
- Go Publisher direct when you can. This way if your campaign is a disaster, you know who to chew out
- Avoid the long-tail
- Don’t buy anything from a guy who’s name begins with M and ends with G
- Don’t fork over millions of dollars simply because a firm claims to have a “proprietary, best in class, cross-media data platform that connects offline and online audience insights to influence customer Journey” (or any such iteration thereof)
- Reject the temptation of buying space on murky, seedy, shady, ‘dark web’ placements that are filled with undisclosed incentivized inventory, adware and “bad actors” (relax Gal Gadot we’re not talking about you)
- When and if an independently validatable standard is established for Programmatic advertising, hold ‘em to it
Speaking of ad Fraud… Did you know?
You may have unwittingly been a part of the latest OTT Ad scam! Congrats, your activities went undetected even by Google. According to the WSJ, fraudsters tricked ad exchanges into erroneously recognizing ‘flashlight’ and ‘gamming’ apps as OTT. Despite Google having “sophisticated defenses in place to protect its ad system”, at least 29 such apps were available on Google Play and have since been taken down. The apps included code which secretly sent signals over the inter-web shouting “Hey, I’m a popular streaming TV app, pay me and I’ll run your ad (wink, wink)!”
At least 650 million impressions were generated by consumers who were just trying to find the bathroom light switch in the middle of the night.
Header bidding flattens the Waterfall
This is just the type of lingo used by modern day marketers that mystifies the general population, leaving them to assume one of two things:
-there are waterfalls in nature with excessive kinetic energy that are endangering some ecosystems, need to be flattened and header bidding is the latest engineering technology to do it.
or
-that’s a wacky business!
