HOW BAD IS AD FRAUD?

A difficult problem for advertisers to come to terms with is the size and scope of online ad fraud.

Everyone knows it's a headache, but no one knows what kind of headache. Is it just eye strain or am I having a stroke?

If you don't already have a headache, trying to reconcile the various estimates of the size of the problem will give you one.

• Group M, a WPP-owned media company,  says that ad fraud is "significantly contained" and that "2% of impressions purchased by the biggest advertisers in Western markets remain non-human."
   
• The&Partnership, another WPP-owned company, says that ad fraud constituted about 20% of online spending or about $12.5b last year. I think it's cute when two divisions of the same corporation disagree by 1,000%.

• The Association of National Advertisers claims that about $7.2 billion was stolen last year by online ad fraudsters, which would amount to about 11% of total ad spend.
   
• The World Federation of Advertisers say that fraud could be as high $30b which would be almost 50% of online ad spend.  
   
• Last year Facebook announced that they had cancelled a buying platform they were testing when they found that 75% of the inventory coming into the platform was "valueless."

• Oxford BioChronometrics says fraud could be as high as 90%.

In other words, everyone has an opinion and no one has a clue.

Most of the people I talk to who appear knowledgeable guess that the number is probably between 20% and 40%.  But the problem is, no one really knows.

From what I understand the difficulty in ascertaining a real number is that the people who measure fraud (the cyber-security crowd) all have different criteria for deciding whether a visitor is a human or a bot (WARNING: DUMBASS BLOGGER EXPLANATION COMING UP...)

Remember, in the digital realm everything is either a 1 or a 0. There ain't that much difference between a human 1 and a robotic 1. So the security boys have to set up filters that look for patterns and try to interpret what's a human pattern and what's a robotic pattern.

Meanwhile, the bad guys are constantly sending feelers to see which patterns they can invent will pass through the filters. Once they find a winning pattern they bombard the system with fraudulent traffic and clicks.

Consequently, when a cyber-security firm reports that 5% of traffic is fraudulent, what they are really saying is that their nets were able to catch 5% of the fish, but they don't really know how many fish got through the nets.

In one instance, as a test, an ad fraud fighter sent 100% robotic traffic through a network and only 17% of it was identified as such by a leading cyber security firm.

Fraud is a major problem. In an environment in which over half of display ads aren't even visible and adtech middlemen are scraping 60-70% of working media dollars, rampant fraud is the last thing we need.

But who gives a damn?

It's Opening Day. I'm going to have a hot dog and a beer. I'm going to sit in the sunshine till the back of my neck is red and raw and my ass stings like a shot of tequila on a bad patch of strep throat.

What the hell, I'm having two hot dogs.

Once a year, every aspect of life should have an Opening Day. Every business should have one. Every friendship should have one. Every family should have one.

A day when everything starts over. When all of last year's successes and failures go into the record book, no longer a matter of life and death, just a matter of history. A day when the slate is clean and the possibilities are unlimited. A day when you call in sick-and-tired; when you leave the iPhone in the glove compartment; when you go somewhere where the grass is perfect and the people are unaccountably cheerful.

It's Opening Day. Let's play ball.

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