"Please click here to confirm that you are not a robot..."

If you encounter this conversation while browsing the web, you won't be too surprised. This may be the advertiser's fear that their real gold and silver investment is being wasted on the robot audience and that they have to set the "verify the right" level. After all, in 2014 alone, interactive advertising in the UK revealed that online advertising would have been worth a whop.19 billion pounds, but at least that would have been the amount committed36%will eventually flow inNon-human readerThe "eye" - that is, more than a third of online advertising ends with the presence of a large number of bots (commonly known as Boots) on the Internet.

It is the automation mechanism of the chain of operation of digital advertising itself that has built a breeding ground for a large number of zombie websites, bots, etc., thus inducing bad people to take advantage of this network system full of monsters for economic gain. No wonder britain's Guardian newspaper warns that today's fraudulent economy in digital advertising, if not stopped in time, could one day fall into the hands of online aphids.

"I know inAdvertising.onInvestment.Half of it is useless, but the problem is that I don't know which half" - a famous phrase from John Wanamaker.Goldbach guessed"。 And with the birth of digital advertising, the industry once cheered "that half of the wasted advertising spending can finally be recovered." Because digital marketing is about driving accurate information flow through big data, user portraits, and spending every penny on a knife edge, avoiding keeping advertisers in an information silo.

But is it all true, in fact? Digital advertising does have the incomparable advantage of traditional advertising (which in itself is enough to explain the indisputable trend of geometric expansion of the digital advertising industry in recent years), but the other side of the coin, undeniably, also has "multiple crimes" increasingly paid to the surface.

In addition to the "little monster" phenomenon described earlier, "scene punching" can be described as another flaw. Private Eye, a British satirical magazine, has set up a section called Malgorithms to mock misplaced advertising cases... One example describes how, if a suitcase brand's up-and-coming ad is next to a news story about a "body found in a suitcase," it means that digital ads that rely solely on keyword technology have smart short boards that "don't recognize the meaning of the content." The BBC laments that "humans are not yet completely redundant!" "

If the above examples are anything to go by, fraud and fraud are the "more out-of-the-way" practices that have surfaced in the procedural digital advertising industry. In the early fall of 2016, Dentsu, one of the world's largest advertising companies, was ceded by its client, Toyota, to a scandal of receiving money but not running ads. The group acknowledged 633 cases of high fees (mostly performance-based digital advertising) involving at least $2.3 million;

Just days before the incident, tech giant Facebook admitted to errors in measuring the amount of time users spend watching video ads on its social networking sites, which can be as high as 60 to 80 percent. This error can lead to misleading advertisers' investment decisions, especially when it comes to deciding how much money and the proportion of ads are allocated between video platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and major television stations.

Facebook's publisher partners have also been implicated. News outlets like the New York Times are under pressure from advertisers to prove how many readers are watching every second of the online video content they provide, and that the data is not inflated.

The above-mentioned incident caused a stir in the industry. Advertising Week, once uncensionedly described by the media as the "annual chat and self-talk conference", takes place every fall in New York, and this year a serious topic of "crisis of confidence" has emerged in a panel discussion at the general assembly over the "electricity" and "Facebook events". Bob Liodice, president of the National Association of Advertisers, also spoke, citing widespread distrust of advertising platforms and agents among member companies.

It is not hard to see that today's dominance of digital advertising platforms by giants such as Facebook and Google undoubtedly contributes to the risk of maximising capital utilization.In 2015, Facebook and Google swallowed up as much as 75 percent of the nation's online advertising growth, according to analysts at KPCB, a venture capital firm. At the same time, the "walled gardens" formed by the two giants (i.e., they are almost squealing at the data) are increasingly being criticised by the advertising industry.

To add to the woes, advertisers are at the mercy of advertising agencies, especially the big ones.It is difficult to say that the above-mentioned "electricity incident" is only a case in point. Because in the U.S., a study by the National Association of Advertisers found that when advertising agencies buy advertising locations from various platforms, they can increase the price by as much as 90 percent when they sell them to customers, and some agencies get rebates from the platforms but don't tell advertisers. (Of course, the report was refuted by "people on the other side of the table": the 4As, an association representing advertising companies, described it as "one-sided rhetoric". )

Moreover, the lack of awareness on the part of the brand side - or the amb few words based on the ostrich effect - objectively allows for traffic voids caused by fraud, whether by robots or agents.On the one hand, many marketers don't know exactly where their ads end up; On the other hand, a more serious problem than a lack of awareness/tools is that almost every part of the advertising ecosystem may benefit from false traffic (or at least the embodiment of work KPIs), so it is natural that employees within the advertiser will choose to act as ostrich for fear of "self-independentness".

Although no one has so far publicly accused Facebook of fraud in the video viewing time statistics, many in the industry have begun to "prescription" the platform's data inflate, even if it was caused by mistakes.

Keith Weed, Unilever's chief marketing officer, has been an advocate for breaking the "walled garden". Technology companies that don't allow third-party independent companies to evaluate their platform data, he says, are "giving themselves a job."

Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP, the world's largest advertising communications group, also said the Facebook incident made people aware that demand for services from independent data institutions such as ComScore was growing and that they should play a bigger role in monitoring key advertising metrics.

"We've been urging platform owners, such as Facebook and Google, to open up their data and enable independent assessments. After all, referees and players can't be the same person," he said.

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Author: Albo Soval, source: CMO Club

This article was originally published in IT Managers World magazine and is written by a Chinese media columnist

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