Google Rallies Advertising Industry At IAB Summit To Stop Fraud
- by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, February 12, 2019
The advertising industry loses millions of dollars annually to advertising fraud. At the IAB Leadership Summit in Phoenix, Per Bjorke, senior product manager at Google, rallied advertisers, agencies, publishers and platform providers to work together to stop ad fraud.
Bjorke drew from his recent work with White Ops. In November 2018, Google and White Ops uncovered a digital ad-fraud scheme called 3ve, which involved several schemes in which the U.S. Department of Justice became involved. Defendants allegedly used malware-infected computers to run automated ad-fraud schemes without users’ knowledge or consent.
The 3ve malware scheme hit more than 1.7 million computers and resulted in $29 million in payments for fake digital ads.
Not all invalid traffic is categorized as ad fraud. The industry, however, needs to accept that there is no "silver bullet" to solve the economic hardship created by ad fraud, Bjorke said.
Bjorke believes ads.txt, also known as Authorized Digital Sellers, aims to provide a
secure method that publishers and distributors can use to verify
the companies they authorize to sell their digital inventory. He said it can help to stop ad fraud, although it is not a silver
bullet.
This is hard work that is ongoing ,and everyone needs to contribute, he said.
Contributing to the ad-fraud problem are too many intermediaries in the supply chain and less-than-stellar ad inventory.
Some believe blockchain can reduce ad fraud by detecting the invalid traffic. The technology might be able to follow the money if it can tap into the entire ecosystem, but won’t necessarily detect valid from invalid traffic or detect shell companies.
The same type of fraud doesn’t happen with search ads. The main fraud occurs from sabotage from competitors. For example, one dry cleaner business might compete with another up the street. One might try to waste the other's budget by clicking on their ads.
Google has technology that can curtail search fraud from occurring, and uses ads.txt to try and stop ad fraud in other types of advertising.
During the questions at the end of the presentation, IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg said the IAB is working to educated officials in Washington about the problems surrounding ad fraud.
Laurie, having been publishing for 15 years Fortune company sweepstakes, I have seen just about every ad scam types running through servers. As a result of publishing over 72,000 sweeps and contests and over 1.5 billion click through entries, the problem is not with the publishers, advertisers or ad agencies, but the parties that created their own set of rules. This being Google and IAB. Yes, the subjects in your article. Why? Many years ago, all online ads were placed in categories or by industry. for the sweepstakes publishers including NYC women type magazines, every one was grouped in with "Gambling". Sweepstakes is not gambling. The sponsor/advertisers don't charge to charge a entry fee to enter a Ford Motor Co. or NBC or even a HGTV Home sweepstakes. No money is changed hands. However Google and IAB has put the advertisers, ad agencies and publishers in this discriminatory and extreme bias category. Worse the end user is not seeing the advertisers sweepstakes ads because Google and IAB is blocking their ads with their rules. By doing so, this also drives up the ad cost for the because few websites that the ad can be shown on drives up the bidding for the ad location. So when you talk about ad fraud, let's get the fraud out of the rules first.