It’s easy to forget now but, when credit cards first came on to the scene, they suffered a bad reputation, as poor security measures allowed nefarious clerks and larger-scale operators to clone and defraud accounts.

Nowadays, however, credit card fraud is declining year on year. For ad industry types still wringing their hands at ad fraud, there is a salutary lesson, says the boss of ad-tech vendor OpenX.

“We’re not going to make it go away, because criminals exist and they try to exploit any problem,” Tim Cadogan tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “But we think we’re well on the path to managing the problem.

“We all use credit cards, there is fraud, but the companies that operate the cards … do a really good job of managing and mitigating the fraud.”

Distill Networks research reckons a phenomenal $1 in every $3 spent is lost to ad fraud.

In recent years, the industry has been freaking out about the ways in which rogue operators can game the system to take buyers’ money.

But Cadogan believes the whole problem can be mitigates.

“Before this industry, I was in the search industry at Yahoo and Overture,” he explains. “There, the problem was click fraud.

That industry managed to control that problem – it still exists – to the point where it’s not really a major issue anymore. I think we’re going to get to that place because of the kinds of technologies and approaches that we’ve put in place.”

This video part of a series about the state of programmatic advertising sponsored by OpenX.  Please find other videos from the series here.

By Robert Andrews on    @robertandrews