AdMaster Leads the Way in Proactively Combating Online Ad Fraud and Promoting Accountability in Advertising Industry

BEIJING, Sept. 22, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- In the first half of this year, up to 28% of the traffic in advertisers' digital campaigns was recognized as fraud, bringing serious concern about the integrity of the online advertising inventory the advertisers are buying, according to AdMaster's newly released "2016 Digital Advertising Anti Ad-fraud White Paper", which covers a big number of advertising campaigns in China by more than 500 advertisers from a wide range of industries in the time period between Jan 1st to May 30th.

"Compared with traditional media such as print and television, the online platforms are more complex, and their growing sophistication and intricacies make it often impossible to monitor and highly vulnerable to abuse," said Tenly Wu, Chief Product Officer of AdMaster.

Both in China and around the world, digital ad spending has enjoyed robust year-over-year growth over the past few years. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau's annual study, in 2015, digital ad revenues reached nearly $60 billion, a 20% jump compared to the year before. In China, despite the economic slowdown, digital ad spend is expected to reach $40.42 billion in 2016, a 30% increase on last's year's spend, according to eMarketer.

Tenly insists that, "It's becoming very imperative for advertisers to get to know how much of their digital advertising spend is wasted, and how, so they could take precautionary measures to minimize the potential loss."

Fighting against ad fraud is a global war…

Advertisers have long known that fraud exists in digital media; however, due to the coming of the big data era and the rapid progress in digital advertising and programmatic buying, the scale of ad fraud has become rampant worldwide.

In a blog post by Facebook's Head of Ad Tech this March, the social media giant decided to shut down its demand-side ad buying platform into Atlas after discovering that "many bad ads and fraud (like bots)," sometimes it could be as high as over 75% of the total volume.

And it's not a single case. According to a recent estimate by the World Federation of Advertisers, between 10% and 30% of online advertising slots are never seen by consumers because of fraud, and it forecasts that marketers could lose as much as $50bn a year by 2025 unless they take radical action.

China, standing at the center of the global digital marketing evolution, is no exception.

"The evolution of ad placement technology from a time-based pricing model to CPM-based and now people-based gave rise to a variety of ad frauds ranging from non-human traffic (or 'bots'), to video ad fraud and more," said Tenly. "The whitepaper is not only aimed at presenting a reality-check on the escalating ad fraud issues in China, but most importantly, showing how we can use reliable and plausible solutions and technology to ensure that as little as possible of advertisers' advertising budgets fall victim to ad fraud," Tenly said.

Highlights of the Whitepaper

• Overall, the the ratio of fraudulent traffic varies among different campaigns, ranging from 5% to 95% against total traffic. The ratio of ad fraud among 63% of the campaigns covered in the whitepaper was lower than 20%, while 7% of the campaigns found more than 50% of its traffic was fraudulent ads.
• The most pernicious and common variety of ad fraud was Non-human Traffic, or "bots", that simulate the activity of a real person browsing the web or using an app. As a result, the paid online display ads that ad networks, media buyers and ad agencies have knowingly been selling to clients have never appeared in front of live human beings. In this regard, vertical media (41%) and DSP/Ad Networks (technology platforms that aggregate large numbers of websites) (34%) see the highest volume of fake inventories. Compared to mobile (19.8%), PC (36%) had more fake inventories.
• The growing popularity of online video over the past few years has drawn the attention of fraudsters. The most common varieties of video ad fraud in this category include ad placement in the wrong title (13%), or the video ads don't appear in the place that they are supposed to appear (8%).
• Fraud in customer-registration and the app download process is also very common today, and it's very tough to tell the difference between fraudulent leads and true leads.

It's time to clean up the industry, and to safeguard brand security

While it's widely recognized in ad industry circles that the fraudulent traffic bears high stakes for advertisers, Hong Bei, Chief Technology Officer of AdMaster, believes the loss caused by ad fraud can be even bigger than the claimed loss of billions of dollars each year. "Besides the financial loss, ad fraud could also lead to shaping a negative image of the brand, bringing serious threats to brand safety, especially when ads are inadvertently placed on fraudulent websites."

In fact, despite the unprecedented growth of digital marketing over the past few years thanks to the rise of the mobile internet, ad budgets for digital campaigns still only account for 31% of worldwide ad budgets in 2016, according to the forecast by WPP's GroupM. "One of the main reasons behind this is a 'lack of trust' in the online ad market, especially the doubt from advertisers in terms of whether digital ads can be delivered as promised," said Calvin Chan, the Chief Operating Officer of AdMaster.

"In the meantime, ad fraud, which always results in unseen ads, brand safety concerns and false audience numbers, could further undermine the trust and confidence of advertisers in digital media," says Calvin.

With people-based marketing and marketing automation becoming the mainstream of today's digital media buying/planning strategy, AdMaster sees an increasing importance of equipping the advertisers with the tools to fight online ad fraud, thus minimizing their potential loss from false inventory and impressions in their digital ad campaigns.

Sift out the true from the false with AdMaster's innovative anti-fraud technology

As advertisers typically pay media for their ads based on the basic metrics like page views and video views, regardless of whether the users are actual people or bots (computers hijacked by viruses that are programmed to visit sites and mimic human behavior, creating the illusion of authentic web traffic in order to lure in advertisers), one common scheme of ad fraud involves manipulating the computers of unsuspecting consumers.

In this regard, based on its 10 years of rich experience in ad tracking and measurement and its corporate strategy of becoming a "data hub" in China's marketing ecosystem, AdMaster is committed to building a "device ID-based credit system" to combat fraud.

Combined with scientific modeling and statistics, this credit system is built on online behaviors of all different device IDs (including IP address and device IDs). By adding the fake ones onto a blacklist as a reference, the system serves as a sifter to detect and mark in real time the fraudulent activities from the fraudulent IDs.

Regarding identifying the video ad fraudulent activities as mentioned above, the key lies in how to use detection technologies to peek into what, where and how the ads were displayed in the automated ad marketplace.

"It's all about how to use anti-fraud tools to police the system by providing ad verification and further evidence for ad fraud activities, so as to help advertisers minimize their loss," Tenly said. For example, through analyzing the IDs of different program titles, the anti-fraud capability could tell whether the advertisers' ads were displayed in the right titles that they invested. Besides, the anti-fraud tools are able to record all the ads in a massive sample pool when they were placed along the video content and capture the moments when ads were displayed. By matching the monitored ads with the ads in AdMaster's database (provided by clients/agencies), advertisers could know whether their ads have been delivered in the right way as promised.

Accreditation for high-quality media and a trustworthy third-party measurement agency are the first step to address the problem

Globally, both advertisers, and industry as a whole, are joining forces and take concrete steps to fight online ad fraud.

"As an independent and trusted partner for advertisers, we hope our neutral, independent and comprehensive scrutiny on China's digital ad market, and our constant attempts to use data technology to safeguard the interests of advertisers, can shed light on the industry in terms of how to keep fraud out of our system, and build a healthy, reliable, transparent digital ad market in China," said Wu.

The China Media Rating Council (CMRC) was founded on Aug. 10 this year by partners from China's digital advertising ecosystem. As China's first media evaluation and certification organization, CMRC is planning to introduce a new advertising ecosystem into China, in which IAB will be responsible to issue industry standards, while US MRC will be in charge of certifying high-quality media and third party measurement agencies. "This move will allow publishers to focus on selling quality impressions and enable them to garner higher CPMs that their inventory demand," said Tenly.

" As a leading marketing data technology company, we are playing our part in helping push forward the establishment of quality standards for digital ad traffic, in the end, creating a favorable and healthy environment for the future development of China's digital advertising industry in the years to come," said Vincent Yan, founder and CEO of AdMaster.

SOURCE AdMaster