While most marketers are familiar with the concept of online advertising fraud, the conversation spiked recently with an article in The Atlantic, "Welcome to the Internet of Thingies: 61.5% of Web Traffic Is Not Human." The piece details how, for the first time, bot traffic has eclipsed human traffic, accounting for 61.5% of all website visitors. While this fraudulent traffic may be considered a mere nuisance to most marketers, what they might not realize is how much it's actually costing them. According to a recent article, the cost is estimated to be on the order of $6 billion annually.

When the ANA, the 4A's and the IAB came together to create the Making Measurement Make Sense initiative (3MS), we knew we would accelerate marketers' ability to use digital media to build brands along with legacy media. We knew that digital measurement needed to work in a cross-platform world. In addition, 3MS has to give brands the tools for the right allocations of media for an individual brand at a particular moment in its evolution.

The news, announced this week, of Google and comScore parnering on metrics with validated Campaign Essentials is a major step forward for digital advertising. Making it easy for advertisers to evaluate digital advertising investment against a metric that CMOs have been using for decades (the Gross Rating Point, or GRP) represents a major evolution for Google, as it's one of the first, and easily most significant, instances of the digital giant embracing non-Google means of measurement.

While the digital advertising industry has been on an onward trajectory, and spending is at a high, upwards of 20% to 30% of all online ads are affected by suspicious activity by cybercriminals.