• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

AI is impacting many parts of the advertising ecosystem. The notion that consumers will use agents to receive, assess, and respond to ads on their behalf is a topic many in our business are discussing today.

How this could actually work is a complex issue that will take the industry time to sort out, and will likely be the end product of a number of different initiatives among individual companies and platforms. How, for example, will advertisers and media companies manage the different business and pricing models between impressions consumed by humans and those consumed by code, which are neither seen, heard nor experienced by any humans?

But that’s not the issue I want to write about today. I want to focus on the bad side of bots, an issue all of us confront daily, whether we’re aware of it or not. Malicious bots are an enormous part of the digital media and ad ecosystem, programmed and deployed by those intending everything from criminal fraud to personal annoyance to political polarization.

If you question the last point, look no further than the enormous drop of right-wing “attack” traffic on X.com earlier this week that seemed to perfectly coincide with Ukraine’s destruction of a major Russian data center operated by Yandex.

And the Association of National Advertisers has been both telling and showing us for years about the enormous presence of bots masquerading as human audiences on “made-for-advertising” sites that supply significant impression volumes to digital programmatic ad exchanges.

While awareness of “bad bots” has improved, we don’t seem to know how to remove them from our ecosystem. Or maybe we don’t want to? For many, digital bots represent business advantage: impressive, inflated audience views for publishers; cheap — even if hollow — impressions for advertisers; and lots of low-cost, low-maintenance transactions — and fees — for ad-tech platforms.

So, while many spend tens of thousands of both human and agentic hours developing our agentic ad ecosystem, I ask you when our industry will have the willingness, let alone the capability, to keep malicious bots from fouling the dream of an agentic advertising ecosystem.

What do you think?