Commentary

Fraud Prevention Will Tip The 'Scale' Of Online Video

James Akhbari, VP and digital media director at Havas, told the audience at OMMA Video at Internet Week New York that he is “old school” and wants to buy premium ad inventory that he knows isn't fraudulent, and that the best way to do so involves avoiding automation.

David Hahn, SVP of product management at Integral Ad Science, responded to Akhbari by pointed out that that approach requires one to assume that there’s no premium video ad inventory available in programmatic, a notion Hahn disagrees with.

“There’s a lot of premium in programmatic,” he said, before acknowledging that it’s mixed up with the “crap.”

But Hahn believes technology is capable of sorting quality inventory from the mess and bringing fraud down to “manageable levels” in programmatic. If it does, he believes that “the publishers who are being pushed down from a value perspective [by using programmatic] will” begin putting higher-quality inventory into the marketplace.

“That’s how the industry will scale,” he asserted. “We can’t scale with insertion orders anymore.”

1 comment about "Fraud Prevention Will Tip The 'Scale' Of Online Video".
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  1. Khalid Low from Kerwin Communications, May 27, 2014 at 10:35 a.m.

    Other than Video Quality, the other two leading concerns with programmatic buying are price control and maintaining direct relationships with media buyers/planners.
    But I think the biggest problem with video is limited inventory. There simply isn't much of it as there is display inventory and this leads us back to quality.

    While I agree with James' assertion on quality, the one thing we can't ignore is that the digital industry is always EVOLVING with game changing technology coming up quicker than you can blink which leads us to probably the major benefit of programmatic i.e. the ability to make data-driven purchases (algorithmic targeting). This should be the biggest selling point (and it is) but it's still a Catch-22, planners/buyers are looking for efficiencies and programmatic buying is the current trend and it will be until a new technology shows up but to James's point, lack of quality means waste of media dollars

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