The&Partnership’s Johnny Hornby is leading the charge against ad fraud – in the UK at least – and heading up Hornby’s posse is chief technology officer Ross Barnes.
Here’s Barnes on the Beeb with some hair-raising tales about the evil bots and the amount of advertiser money they purloin – $10-15bn he reckons.
Barnes reckons some of The&P’s clients have got online fraud down to just 0.3 per cent – ahah, strategy showing…
But it’s an important issue just the same.
Of course it wouldn’t happen if media agencies and advertisers employed humans to choose the websites they advertise on. They won’t, because of cost. So one’s sympathy should, perhaps, be tempered.
It’s concerning to see that the person who is “heading” fight against ad fraud thinks that they understand ad fraud perfectly and are able to measure it absolutely, or otherwise it would be impossible to make ANY statement about absolute level of a given client. Also the point about “using humans to choose websites where money goes” is mad, there are about 10,000,000 websites in the programmatic eco-system, and a lot of the value can be found on small long-tail sites like specialist blogs etc.
The very nice thing here is to see this in mainstream news, great job with that. Also I appreciate the fact that the total ad fraud revenue is not estimated as low as some of the alleged counter ad fraud companies are putting it.
I see that but just because there are zillions of websites in the ‘eco system’ it doesn’t mean that you have to use/include them all.