ORLANDO — The collection of fears lumped under the “transparency” banner – ad fraud, viewability, and so on – have plagued advertising for the last couple of years.
But now a concerted effort has helped overcome one of the key challenges – according to a cross-industry program established to tackle the problems.
“We have turned the corner on acts of omission,” according to Mike Zaneis, president of the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), a non-profit umbrella through which 400 companies are working on the issues, referring to those outfits which simply ignored the threat.
“Companies just turning a blind eye to these is no longer happening at large scale because marketers and agencies won’t allow it. It’s too important.”
TAG was established two and a half years ago with a mission to fight criminal activity in the supply chain. It now has a membership across 26 countries.
In a study TAG published with E&Y this week, the group says anti-piracy steps taken by the digital advertising industry have reduced ad revenue for pirate sites by between 48 and 61 percent, calling it “notable progress against the $2.4 billion problem of infringing content”.
But the job is not done. Zaneis still sees a lingering problem in tackling actual ad fraud.
“What we still see is a massive problem with that fraud around the criminals that set out to defraud our industry of billions of dollars,” he tells Beet.TV. “It’s going to take more action to identify and filter out this fraudulent non human traffic.
“Our goal is to put these folks behind bars.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
