• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, November 7, 2014

Everytime I see a commercial for a laundry detergent, I feel kind of dirty. If, now, my detergent has grime-fighters, what the hell was going on before?

Of course, we’re used to this line. Your 2013 car is laughably inadequate compared to the same model in 2014, too, and you might have to live like that for years. Tough break.

So today, The Wall Street Journal’s CMO blog is all agog because digital advertising firms are guaranteeing to advertisers that their ads are actually viewable.   

“Now, ad companies are flocking to offer “no fraud” guarantees to their clients in an attempt to prove they’ve got a handle on the situation,” writes Jack Marshall. “Though it may seem a basic minimum requirement, ad sellers are suddenly touting ‘fraud-free’ advertising as a point of differentiation in the marketplace.”  

It does indeed beg the question: “What was happening to my ads before?” The answer is either obvious or maybe, unknown. “Whatever was (or wasn’t) happening before,” ad sellers seem to be saying, “won’t happen again, if it ever happened in the first place, which maybe it did. Guaranteed.”

All this talk about holiness now must be the start of the latest trend. There’s a lot of it going around. Early in October, the IAB formed a new anti-fraud unit, which grew out of something called the IAB Trustworthy Digital Supply Chain Initiative. Whew!

The CMO blog notes two new anti-fraud offers announced recently, from DataXu and AppNexus. But there are many more, and apparently a need. Some estimates say half of all ads served are, one way or another, bogus. Last year Vindico said 57% of 8 billion ads it tracked were unviewable, even by an easier standard than the MRC’s two-second test.

“Such tricks are mainly found on long-tail and mid-tail sites, particularly at the end of the month or quarter when various parties are trying to meet impression promises,” explained a recent story on AdMonsters.com. “And while not completely complicit, chief accomplices are networks and exchanges. Similar to the display world, agencies seeking cheap (read: underpriced) video inventory are getting what they paid for: lots of unseen video ads.”

Earlier this week, RocketFuel proposed its Quality Challenge, in which it strongly suggests that marketers buying digital ads have the quality for those impressions validated by that IAB anti-fraud group. And it offered, free of charge, its own Traffic Scanner tool that monitors quality sites, or so it says.

There’s obviously work to be done. It’s a messy problem, possibly helped along by advertisers themselves that can use the uncertainty of viewability to drive down prices they’re paying with the logical (if not sincerely believed) suspicion they’re being hoodwinked by technology. “Because if they can point to a third party and say, look this is non- human viewing, I’m not paying for it, that helps them,” Evolve Media’s Brian Fitzgerald told me, as he was pitching his INgage ad unit,which only plays when an actual human being’s mouse goes to the ad and lingers a while.

Everybody seems to be in the business of solving viewabililty. That's not a bad thing. But a business where everybody is pitching a solution seems to suggest a business that  has a pretty big problem.