Hasta La Creative!

It was a simple concept once: bundle third-party ad feeds with your own ads to provide better coverage of inventory for publishers. The advent of real-time bidding (RTB) would differentiate the value of the inventory — high-value, front-page inventory on CNN.com should be priced higher than a bottom-of-the-fold ad on a cooking site no one ever heard of.

But rampant ad fraud, viewability issues and loss of control on ad placements have turned a simple arbitrage scheme into “garbitrage.”

Ad verification software has become a big business, with providers helping advertisers identify fraudulent impressions and undesirable ad placement on risky content. Early on, ad tech companies incorporated blacklists of suspect domains and even shared the data across platforms. However, keeping up with the bad actors was daunting. Whitelisting domains could eliminate the cheap fraud, but it was no match for sophisticated schemes that masked domain addresses. Was the ad truly being purchased and delivered to CNN? It was still too hard to tell.

Continue reading at AdAge.com