#336/March 30, 2025

This week the Wall Street Journal had a major piece entitled 'Efforts to Weed Out Fake Users for Online Advertisers Fall Short.' The piece is focused on something I've written about a lot - how the reports marketers get about their online campaigns are completely unreliable.

But let's start at the beginning. First let's take a look at the scope of fraud in online advertising. The Journal published this chart, from Juniper Research, which estimates online ad fraud this year at over $100 billion.

You would think losing over $100 billion in one year to fraud would cause some kind of angst in the ad community. Not a bit. We have normalized stupidity and incompetence to such an extent that all you hear are crickets.

Next, the Journal reports on a new study by Adalytics that indicates the following:

• "The top three companies that advertisers pay to detect and filter out bots—DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science and Human Security—regularly miss nonhuman traffic."
   
• " The report...found tens of millions of instances over seven years in which ads for brands including Hershey’s, Tyson Foods, T-Mobile, Diageo, the U.S. Postal Service and the Journal were served to bots across thousands of websites."
   
•  "This occurred even in cases when bots identified themselves as such" Let me emphasize this. Some bots are harmless, identify themselves as such, and just perform non-detrimental tasks. Even when non-malign bots identified themselves as bots the so-called 'fraud detection' companies couldn't find them. 'It’s like, can you tell the difference between a person and a person-shaped sock puppet that is holding up a sign saying, ‘I am a sock puppet’?' said Laura Edelson, a computer science professor at Northeastern University and former Justice Department technologist."
   
• "DoubleVerify missed 21% of the documented bot visits and allowed ads to be served to them, according to (one) publisher’s analysis...In some cases, DoubleVerify’s software identified a bot but still let a brand buy an ad for that audience, the analysis showed." That's worth emphasizing - they found bots but still treated them as human and the advertiser got charged. How's that for incompetence?
   
• "Fighting fraud by bad actors—which don’t flag themselves as bots—is even harder." If  these clowns can't identify a bot that turns itself in and announces it's a bot, how in the f-ing world are you supposed to believe it can find bad bots that are trying to hide?

Here's the bottom line.

-- You have marketing numbskulls buying advertising from the programmatic fraud factory. They have no idea what they're buying, who they are buying from, what they are paying, or what they are getting.

-- Then to justify their incompetence they hire these validation clowns who can't find their ass with two hands and a flashlight, and provide them with horseshit reports that 'certify' their brilliance.

--Then they take their bullshit reports to their bosses and say, "Look how smart I am."

According to the Check My Ads Institute, who have been cooperating with Warner in his scrutiny of online advertising, there is "alarming evidence that adtech companies are misleading government entities and taxpayers, charities, and other businesses about their ability to detect and prevent fraudulent ad placements."

Public entities that have been screwed by the "real time bot detection" horseshit of the so-called fraud detection companies include the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the U.S. Census Bureau (Census), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the United States Postal Service (USPS).

In a letter the the head of the FTC, Warner wrote, "Research indicates that certain ad verification companies are making apparently false and misleading claims about the capability of their products..."

​​​​​​​Gosh, who'd a thunk it?

The problem is, no one wants the truth of uncertainty. They prefer the fiction of certitude. Consequently, marketers are quick to adopt singular theories of marketing as oracles of absolute truth.

These day there seems to be an orthodoxy developing around certain concepts that have become knee-jerk solutions. I’m thinking specifically about the “physical and mental availability” theory as defined and described by Byron Sharp and his EBI team. And the “long and short of it” ideas as developed by Les Binet and Peter Field.

These are very useful concepts and should certainly be factored into your thinking about how you go about your business. But, like all such postulations, they are created by mortals, not handed down by god. This means they are fallible and subject to chance. They are very useful in some circumstances and not so useful in others.

The same is true (some would say more true) of the assertions and pronouncements by certain blogweasels. 

Your job is to use your brain. Derive your own hypotheses about what’s best for your product or brand. You need to understand and value what experts and big mouths say, but you also need to learn to improvise and add or subtract from what these people say. Just repeating the stock phrases is not good enough.

All theories about advertising and marketing are wrong. But some are less wrong than others. You need to evolve your own “least-wrong” theory of how to approach advertising for your brand.

Not only do the holding companies stuff Google, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, et al, down their clients’ throats, they have also become ‘principals’ in the selling of platform inventory. In other words, they are essentially brokers for the adtech platforms. They buy up inventory and re-sell it to their clients. I have seen reports that claim agencies are making up to 70% margins on re-selling platform inventory.

The question I’ve been thinking about is why the platforms don’t just buy the agencies? Google’s market cap ($2 trillion) is almost 100 time Publicis ($25 billion.) Facebook’s market cap ($1.5 trillion) is about 100 times Omnicom’s ($15 billion.) They can certainly afford to buy them.

In normal times platforms buying agencies would trigger all kinds of anti-trust action. But under Trump, just a few million spread here and there would grease the skids nicely.

It turns out that advertising is one of the world’s most profitable businesses. Google (whose revenue is about 85% from advertising) and Meta (whose revenue is 98% from advertising) are some of the richest companies the world has ever seen. Maybe they don't want to own ad agencies. Maybe they've discovered that all the profit is at their end. And all the aggravation is at the agency end.

Maybe they’re just smart enough to dominate us, but not dumb enough to own us.

The audiences eat this shit up and take notes and applaud. There’s just one problem. It’s all bullshit. Nobody knows the first thing about the future. Nobody knows what’s going to happen ten minutes from now.

However, like I’m fond of saying, you can’t fact-check the future. So it's the perfect subject for hustlers with a nice powerpoint and a clever line of patter.

Just to give you a taste of how wrong the 'experts' usually are about the future, here are some highlights from a list about the future generated in 2017 by the research and consulting geniuses at Gartner consulting. I found them in an excellent LinkedIn post by Tom Goodwin. This should give you a good laugh.

According to Gartner in 2017...

-  By 2020, 100 million consumers will shop in augmented reality
-  By 2020, 30 per cent of web browsing sessions will be done without a screen
-  20 per cent of brands will abandon their mobile apps by 2019
-  By 2020, algorithms will positively alter the behaviour of billions of global workers
-  By 2022, a Blockchain-based business will be worth $10 billion
-  By 2020, 40 per cent of employees can cut their healthcare costs by wearing a fitness tracker

The future ain't what it used to be.

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