Long before 1) P&G turned off $200 million in digital ad spend and showed no change in business outcomes and 2) Chase reduced "reach" in digital media from 400,000 websites to 5,000 sites and showed no change in business outcomes, we showed a client data that proved certain digital media spend was entirely useless because it was entirely fraudulent -- #TurnOffAdtech. In the chart below, when all of the sessions from a particular source of traffic was turned off, there was no change to the goal events recorded. That meant that none of the goal events were driven by visitors from that source. As it turns out, that was because all of those visits were bots anyway (dark red in the chart).

Since then, more and more #marketers are running their own #TurnOffAdtech experiments and observing that there is no change in business outcomes AND they are getting a more accurate picture of what is happening in their digital media (because the analytics are less skewed by fraud).

More recent examples include the details documented in Uber's second lawsuit - suing mobile ad exchanges for falsifying data and claiming credit for organic installs that would have happened anyway (i.e. the user didn't click on an ad before the install). I have reviewed several other sources of data that confirm this phenomenon -- attribution fraud on a massive scale were fraudsters use the technique of "click flooding" to trick attribution systems into giving them credit for an app install, even if the app were installed "organically." (see chart below). Note that after the paid install campaign was turned off (dark blue) the only thing that changed was that organic installs were no longer incorrectly marked as non-organic (the overall volume did not change, just like in the Uber example).





Marketers Should Run Their Own #TurnOffAdtech Experiments

Even if you, the marketer, doesn't buy the existence of ad fraud or think that it is under control already, consider the portion of your dollar that goes to what is known as the "adtech tax." Multiple studies over the years from different organizations have shown that 40, 50, 60, 70 percent of your dollar gets extracted from the supply chain by adtech companies (for their own profit); that means only a small portion of your dollar goes towards "working media" - i.e. placing the ads on the publishers' sites. Wouldn't it be far more cost effective if you purchased ads directly from the publisher (that has real human audiences) rather than buy massive quantities of ad impressions on long tail sites you've never heard of or visited?

I realize that ALL of this is falling on deaf ears because most #marketers don't want to hear this. But don't take my word for it. Run your own #TurnOffAdtech experiment -- literally turn off your digital media for 1 day, 1 week, or 1 month. And see if there is ANY change to your business outcomes -- yes, your actual business outcomes, not some vanity metrics like amount of impressions, clicks, or traffic. If there is no change after 1 day of turning off adtech, then turn it off for another day, another week, etc. So whether it was ad fraud or not, if digital media was not driving any business outcomes for you, why keep spending money on it. The media dollars would be better spent in other channels like TV or billboards by the roadside, to generate awareness.





Publishers Should Run Their Own #TurnOffAdtech Experiments

Marketers are not the only ones who should run #TurnOffAdtech experiments. Publishers should do that as well. From the publishers' perspective the adtech tax means that 30 cents or less of every dollar goes to them, after ad tech companies extract value for their own profits. Note the following experiments from over the years.

Furthermore, over the years, good publishers added more and more adtech trackers to their sites, thinking they would get more revenues. But instead, most publishers LOST revenue and increased privacy risks. Again, most publishers I have talked with over the years are hesitant to remove adtech trackers out of fear that it would somehow reduce their ad revenue. But the publishers who have run their own experiments have shown that they would not lose revenue. And by cutting out programmatic, one publisher, NYTimes actually grew revenue (yes, I know some of you will argue that it was because of their grown in paid subscriptions).





Consumers' Privacy Would Be Benefited

If marketers ran their own #TurnOffAdtech experiments and publishers ran their own #TurnOffAdtech experiments, they would see what others have seen before them - that adtech doesn't benefit them. In fact adtech harms all parties - the 3 parties to the original unspoken contract of the Internet - consumers, publishers, and advertisers. Adtech is the 4th party that throws the original contact among the three parties out of whack - because adtech is extracting value for itself.

Value is extracted from consumers in the form of privacy violations. Their data is collected without consent or recourse and then bought and sold for the profit of adtech. And this is based on three myths that marketers have been duped into believing -- 1) the myth of the long tail, 2) the myth of behavioral targeting, and 3) the myth of hypertargeting. I won't go into detail here, but for further reading, please see https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/what-surveillance-capitalism-and-how-did-it-hijack-internet





The Enemy Within - Your Own Trade Associations

When I wrote the following deck in 2015, I had not contemplated that even mainstream trade associations would be "in on it" too -- i.e. part of the ad fraud ecosystem. More specifically, they promulgated the industry narrative that "ad fraud is low" and "keep buying" over the last 4 years by spinning ad fraud research for their own purposes.

Now the trade associations are actively suppressing new information about ad fraud and attacking people who don't align with their storyline. The associations also have investments in other entities like standards-setting bodies and "certification providers" that help them protect the status quo, by actively silencing critics and tricking their own members into thinking that "certified" companies are actually helping to reduce fraud.

In their own PUBLIC words on Twitter

The reality is that they are providing "air cover" and a false sense of security, which keeps the wool pulled over their members' eyes -- and allows ad fraud to flourish in broad daylight.

Don't take my word for it... I've been observing this for the last 7 years now and the fraud has not gotten any better. It has gotten far worse, just better disguised and more diversified. Think about it this way, if fraud detection tech worked so well, would we keep seeing these new discoveries practically every month?

July 2019 - https://www.cyberscoop.com/chinese-company-ad-fraud-android-check-point/

June 2019 - https://www.zdnet.com/article/440-million-android-users-installed-apps-with-an-aggressive-advertising-plugin/

May 2019 - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/vidmate-app-download

April 2019 - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/google-play-store-ad-fraud-du-group-baidu

March 2019 - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/in-banner-video-ad-fraud

February 2019 - https://www.adweek.com/programmatic/meet-drainerbot-the-ad-fraud-operation-that-could-be-stealing-your-mobile-data/

January 2019 - https://www.zdnet.com/article/iot-botnet-used-in-youtube-ad-fraud-scheme/

December 2018 - https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/12/massive_ad_frau.html

November 2018 - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/android-apps-cheetah-mobile-kika-kochava-ad-fraud

October 2018 - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/how-a-massive-ad-fraud-scheme-exploited-android-phones-to





Conclusion - Run Your Own #TurnOffAdtech Experiments

The only way to get at the truth is to run your own experiments and see for yourself. The best way to do this is to #TurnOffAdtech. The reason this is the best way is because everyone you depend on to measure ad fraud for you has an incentive to lie to you -- in other words, they have misaligned incentives. We have shown over the years that agencies happily show you fraud reports that show low to no fraud, so they can continue buying large quantities of impressions for you, and lower cost stuff (which means higher profit margins for them). We have shown that fraud detection tech is easily fooled by fraudsters so the impressions and traffic are marked as "valid." But note that valid does not mean "human;" It just means it was not invalid. And large-scale studies like the four annual studies by the ANA and Whiteops literally don't know what they don't know -- they are not measuring all the forms of fraud that are technically not IVT (invalid traffic) or bots that are hitting webpages.

That is why we have moved to showing what IS valid and "validatable" instead of trying to measure what is fraudulent -- knowing that we will MISS more fraud than we are able to detect. See slide deck below for further details.

About the Author: “I consult for advertisers and publishers who actually want to know the truth and who have the courage to do something when they find ad fraud. I am not a fraud detection tech company so I show my clients the supporting data so they can verify for themselves what is fraud and what is not fraud. If they agree, they can take the necessary actions to eliminate the fraud while campaigns are still running, rather than post-mortem fraud reports and trying to get their money back.”

Follow me here on LinkedIn (click) and on Twitter @acfou (click)

Further reading: http://www.slideshare.net/augustinefou/presentations