NEWSLETTER #73 JUNE 18, 2017
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THE FACE OF FRAUD
Last week authorities raided a click farm at a home in Thailand at which they confiscated 500 smart phones, nine computer terminals, and 35,000 sim cards.
What did all this technology do all day and all night? Click on shit.
How many rigs like this are there in the world? Nobody has a clue.
Next up is a Chinese click farm. To watch a video of it, click here.
This click farm is said to have over 10,000 smart phones hooked up for a nice day of clicking on anything you'd like. Wanna boost your Google ratings? Buy a few million clicks. Want your app featured in the App store? Buy a few million more.
Consumers don't trust online advertising. According to a report in Marketing Week "Digital is the least trusted media channel among consumers." When are advertisers going to wake up?
Meanwhile, the people who are supposed to be fighting click fraud are knee deep in perpetuating it. Think I'm exaggerating? Have a look.
The Year Of Doing Nothing
It's been a year since advertisers got their wake-up call. It came when the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) issued its report on media transparency.
According to MediaPost, the report found that advertisers were being screwed by agencies in the form of "non-transparent practices involving kickbacks, incentives, rebate, and fees that aren’t disclosed." Most of these were related to online advertising.
Since then a stream of unpleasant news about online advertising has surfaced. The most damaging are related to online ad fraud and ad tech.
It looks to me like advertisers have done very little but wring their hands and issue press releases about the problems.
In fact, advertisers are still buying the nonsense that's being thrown at them from the online ad industry and their pals in the agency business.
- Facebook and Google, who are quickly becoming the online ad industry, still refuse to abide by the principles of transparency that everyone else in advertising adheres to. The punishment that advertisers meted out? In the 3rd quarter of 2016, 99% of all new online ad dollars went to the duopoly.
- According to Business Insider, at least 20 large advertisers settled with agencies over issues of non-transparency for as much as $10 million each. The advertisers agreed not to reveal what the issues were, which means we will never know how they got screwed and what might still be going on.
- While the ANA and their security consultants were busy high-fiving each other over a supposed drop in ad fraud, enormous new frauds were uncovered demonstrating how unreliable any estimates of ad fraud are, and how inept the cyber-security industry is.
According to the managing director of Blackwood Seven, a media software company...
“Issues of transparency have continually plagued the advertising industry over the last year. While many lofty statements have been made by brands and agencies alike...the industry has hit a roadblock..."
