Hasta La Creative!

Unless you have been living under a digital rock, the mounting outrage about fake impressions is quickening, commensurate with a deepening understanding of ad tech fraud among advertisers. Recently, Forrester confirmed advertisers’ suspiscions in a study titled “The End of Advertising As We Know It.” In it, the analyst firm argues the current backlash against major publishers and ad networks, including Google and Facebook, comes “as advertisers re-examine their digital spend and demand more transparency.”

This has been a long time coming, and what follows is clear: advertisers must confront the issue of fraud from all angles — the buy side and the sell side. This must also include a clear-headed assessment of traffic verification services delivered by outside companies.

An honest look at traffic verification practices reveals a deeply disturbing conflict of interest, in that their business model rests entirely on scoring as many impressions as possible as either “good” or “bad.” In other words, these verification companies are incentivized to keep impression volumes up — not to solve the underlying fraud issues, which would naturally reduce the number of impressions scored.

Continue reading at AdAge.com