• by Tobi Elkin , Staff Writer @tobielkin, May 5, 2017

Ad blocking and ad fraud are just two of the topics that GroupM tackles in its annual “Interaction” report, dubbed “This Year, Next Year.” The media planning and buying giant looks at a number of global market trends in the digital advertising ecosystem and offers its take on them.

GroupM says the average ad block use/install rate hovers around 16% in early 2017. It arrived at this percentage through a combination of PageFair’s published estimates from January and other sources used by its local agencies around the world.

The report said ad-blocking adoption has slowed in several countries in Western Europe, while steady growth is the consensus in the U.S. In Asia, Germany, and Argentina there’s more concern about ad blocking, where mobile usage and growth are quite high.

Portugal’s local publishers estimate 13% ad blocking, somewhat below PageFair’s 21%. GroupM suggests the gap might be due to the difference between the publishers’ audiences and those that use long-tail content.

GroupM’s Plista seems to offer accurate readings for Russia and the U.K., with ad-blocking rates on Russia’s top 70 sites ranging between 15% and 25%, and the U.K. finding Plista consistent with PageFair’s January 2017 reading of 16% on desktop and 1% on mobile.

The report said that “no one claims to have eliminated fraud, but the global platforms and marketplaces are helping much more than say two years ago. When demand exceeds supply, there are rich pickings for the same professional fraudsters who also infiltrate online payments and banking.”

GroupM boldly suggests that it will take five to 10 years for digital advertising to become as secure as the banking sector is. Machine learning and artificial intelligence could be of some help in this arena.

GroupM reports that several countries regard 1% to 2% fraud as being “under control.” Further,  “Australia cites a 2.8% result from 4 billion impressions checked by Moat. Hungary reports a current 5% fraud rates in manual buys, which is a concern, and even worse in automated buying.”

According to the report,  fraud is not yet controlled in South Africa and Russia. In Russia, local ad servers don’t track fraud and global ad servers have low penetration.

GroupM distinguished between impression fraud (ghost sites and malicious non-human traffic) and non-impression fraud (ad stacking, substandard sites, willful non-compliance, etc). China also distinguishes between bot fraud and fraud by human “click farms,” but notes click-farm countermeasures aren’t very advanced and still require human intervention on a case-by-case basis.

In Italy, 90% of programmatic buying is conducted in private and controlled markets, as opposed to the open market. This is said to keep fraud at 1%. The report said GroupM U.K.’s Trusted Marketplace is a direct channel to leading publishers which sets standards and typically detects 1% to 2% fraud, for which payment is withheld. Unreliable vendors are thrown out.

The GroupM report said top companies for rooting out fraud include Integral Ad Science, Moat, Grapeshot,  Sizmek, Adform, and DoubleVerify. Other tactics to stem ad fraud include forbidding insertion-order suppliers selling GroupM clients “audience extensions” (behavioral look-alikes often passed off as first-party).