Industry Study of Advertising Bot Fraud

The ANA (Association of National Advertisers) and online fraud detection firm, White Ops have launched ‘The Marketers’ Coalition’, a joint research initiative to determine the level of bot fraud occurring across the digital advertising industry. The coalition’s objective is to provide actionable data and insights which marketers can use to reduce bot fraud and improve marketing ROI.

Bot fraud refers to sites with phony traffic that collect payments from advertisers through the middlemen who aggregate space across many sites and resell that space. This ANA/White Ops initiative actively responds to serious breakdowns in the marketing supply chain. For some marketers it is estimated that 25-50% of money spent on digital advertising is wasted through “bot fraud” which affects display, video, mobile and social.

The Marketers’ Coalition brings together some of the world’s most recognizable brands from 30 companies, across the automotive, consumer products, financial, hospitality, pharmaceutical, retail, spirits, technology and travel industries. This pilot study will assess campaigns from national marketers and will kick off next month. Results are expected by mid-October. During the one-month study, each participant’s advertising, will be tagged to help identify fraud. At the conclusion of the study, each participant will be given a customized confidential report providing overall fraud rates, fraud by platform (desktop, mobile), format (display, video), channel (publisher, network, exchange) and other relevant findings.

“Bot fraud costs marketers billions of dollars annually. Marketers must be proactive to fully understand the issue and identify solutions, said Bill Duggan, ANA, Group EVP.  He added: “These results will create urgency for all legitimate players in the ecosystem to work together to eliminate bots and botnets that target unsuspecting advertisers.”

The study results will be aggregated and made available to all participants and the wider industry. This will allow individual participants to benchmark their specific findings against the industry, leading to specific knowledge on ad budget waste and intelligence that allows for stronger negotiations and media mix optimization.  Aggregated results and recommendations will be shared with the industry in the fourth quarter.

Bob Liodice, President and CEO of the ANA commented: “The findings will be integrated into a broad ecosystem effort to minimize fraud. This ongoing effort is jointly led by the IAB, 4As and the ANA and is focused on creating a trustworthy digital supply chain.”

“The advertising industry is under siege” said White Ops CEO Michael J. J. Tiffany. “While some would say bot traffic is a ‘cost of doing business’ or a ‘victimless crime,’ they could not be more wrong. Corrupt data on campaign targeting and effectiveness harms brands and businesses, and the money made by criminals funds an underground that perpetrates many other forms of crime. Criminals have further benefitted from confusion and uncertainty in scoping the problem. This concerted effort is a way to normalize the data, establish better intelligence and present a unified front.”