• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 5, 2017

Lotame, a data management platform (DMP), on Thursday will announce an exclusive partnership with Are You A Human, which supports technology that ensures ads are served to humans and not bots.

The two companies have been working to address the ad fraud issue that the Association of National Advertisers estimates cost the industry $7.2 billion in 2016. The technology records a range of data across the Internet, such as moments on the page, to determine whether the movements are made by a human.

Are You A Human's technology will integrate with the Lotame Data Exchange to ensure data measurement and quality. The integration will let Lotame measure its data exchange, billions of profiles, for the presence of bots and humans, so that brands can remove bots from their target audience lists before a campaign begins, rather than just estimate the cost for the loss.

Jeremy Hlavacek, VP of global automated monetization at The Weather Company, who oversees the IBM company's partnerships and programmatic ad business, has been working with Lotame for years and recognizes that billions have been lost to fraud.

Hlavacek agrees that the only way to stop fraud from occurring comes during the pre-bid and the pre-buy stages in the advertising process. "It is fraud and we should call it what it is," Hlavacek said. "This is a crime and it's stealing."

In 2016, about 94% of the Web sites were hit with bot traffic that misrepresented marketing analytics, according to Distil Networks. About 96% of login pages and 82% of signup pages were hit with bad bots, and 90% of sites with login pages had bad bots that traversed Web pages behind the logins pages like payment portals.

The partnership between Lotame and Are You A Human aims to stop the high amount of bot traffic to save investments from advertisers as well as investments from publishers.