Everyone in advertising mentioned John Wanamaker’s trick “50% of my ads. “But are you sure there’s only 50% waste?Everyone also jokes about absent users when TV ads are running, while they’re going to urinate or take a snack. In virtual advertising, the challenge is not only users not present, but also non-human users, because we are only talking about bits, bytes and flying numbers on boards and spreadsheets. , virtual parts are not physical and very simple to scale, until you have to physically manufacture counterfeit bags or watches and send them to where consumers are, such as Canal Street in New York.
In fact, digital advertising has been a blessing to criminals, organized and un-organized, because of the ease with which they can scale operations. This may never have been done before, given the limitations of the physical world. Criminals needed human “mules” to move the product and there were dangers of “life and body” in virtually every step of the way. In virtual advertising, the dangers are virtually non-existent, climbing the proven cash generators is easy, profit margins are crazy and can simply “commit crime” without making time, in ear suits. bunny from the comfort of your own game chairs. (How about that for an intellectual image?)
Now create the following. In 2020, there are around 1. 5 billion registered domain names and around 338 million active internet sites. How much do you think humans know or stop in gigantic quantities? Maybe we’ll take the first million Alexa sites and assume they’re the ones that humans stop at. That leaves 337 million other domain names that few humans know about and regularly stop at. When was the last time you typed Arrayxyz, Arrayclub, or Arraycat at the end of a domain to scale to a site? Never? And didn’t you know that an Arraycat domain extension existed? Me neither. There are 337 times the number of Internet sites humans have never heard of, compared to the domain names they just made. Also, there are about 3 million applications in the Google Play Store and 2 million applications in the Apple App Store. And that doesn’t count all non-standard third-party app stores. How many applications do you use daily? How many applications can you name? Ten? Twenty? What are all the other millions of apps for? Who uses them? Humans? Bots?
Virtually all domain names and monetized apps do so through advertising benefits. What happens when there are too few humans to access Internet sites in gigantic quantities or constantly use mobile apps to generate really important revenue?Right, use robots. Bots are very reliable and will come to your sites and use your apps as much as you want, if you pay them to do so. As long as the prices of the supply traffic are lower than the advertising profits it generates, it makes economic sense. The equation can be as undeniable as “for every dollar spent on buying traffic, you get $9 in advertising profits. “Why don’t you invest the next dollar, the next and the next dollar?Really scalable. Really profitable.
If the above proportions (337 million unknown Internet sites for 1 million known sites where humans stop) were not enough to convince you that something is wrong with virtual advertising, let’s take a look at some additional numbers. These will give you an accurate concept of The Scope of this non-human user challenge in virtual advertising. For example, in Connected TV Advertising (CTV), 4 primary fraud operations have been documented and disclosed so far this year, each of which generated tens of millions of fake video impressions using robots. Robots are software systems that simulate humans watching TV streaming (non-human users) to fraudulently generate advertising profits. Of course, more humans broadcast more blockages over television pandemics. fraudulent transactions, which lately are diverting virtual advertising budgets to the highest CPM. Other fraudulent transactions remain hidden or are still under investigation and have not yet been disclosed.
Not to be left behind via CTV, cellular programs also participate in the lucrative action of advertising fraud Mobile apps, such as brightest flashlight apps, wake-up apps, emoji keyboard apps, good looking camera apps, etc. But when was the last time you, or some other human being, used a flashlight or continuous wake-up app for 24 hours?(And don’t have a flashlight and a default watch built into your phone?)
Why prevent in a few dozen mobile apps when you can clone them across thousands (see chart above)?In addition to cloning the apps themselves, scammers also clone full accounts of developers with dozens of programs related to each; This way, if a developer account outside the App Store, other cloned accounts would continue to generate advertising profits for them. Every month so far this year, we have noticed advertising fraud transactions documented and disclosed through cybersecurity companies (see table below for a few examples). Why didn’t Google localize those apps and take them out of the Play Store for brazenly committing advertising fraud and stealing user information?Why did Google approve them in the first place?
So do you think virtual advertising fraud is a 1% or 99% problem?The ANA (Association of National Advertisers), IAB (Interactive Advertising Office) and TAG (Trust Responsibility Group) want you to think it’s a 1% problem. . TAG even claims that its (self-certified) certification program solved fraud, so you may feel comfortable if you proceed to spend giant sums of cash on virtual advertising. But why would they tell you that, when can they see the above statistics and all?witnessed monthly disclosures of primary fraud transactions?
Other examples I’ve documented over the years include: AppNexus removed its exreplace of fake sites and reduced monthly ad impressions from 260 billion to 20 billion, a low of 92%; Chase reduced the number of sites showing its classified ads from 400,000 to 5,000, a 99% down, and saw no replacement in credit card applications; and Uber cut their virtual ad spend by 80% and saw no change in the rate of app installs. Incidentally, Uber is suing a hundred mobile ad exreplaces for altering ad placement reports and completely fabricating them, when they weren’t even running classified ads. And what about scammers who sell you traffic, but don’t deliver traffic with bots? They are just tricking your Google Analytics into thinking you have traffic. After all, that’s what you were looking to see, right? Literally, some marketers were forced to pay millions of dollars for safe numbers in excel spreclassified classified ad sheets (i. e. classifieds classified ads never ran and they weren’t wiser).
With nearly $130 billion in virtual budgets each year in the US, the US has been able to do so. But it’s not the first time And $350 billion in international thefts, scammers are bits, bytes and virtual numbers in spreadsheets to convince marketing specialists that they have performed virtual marketing.
But have the marketing specialists shown virtual ads?Have you faced the double challenge of non-present and non-human users?All the attractive questions to ask, given the relief on prices and tighter budgets. because of the pandemic, amirite?
Additional readings: everything on the Internet
I’ve been a virtual marketer for 25 years. Marketing specialists now audit their virtual campaigns for undetected advertising fraud through widely used ad verification services.
I’ve
I’ve been a virtual marketer for 25 years. Marketing specialists now audit their virtual campaigns for advertising fraud that is not found through widely used ad verification services.
I have witnessed the total arc of virtual marketing evolution since the mid-1990s. I have taught virtually at new York University’s School of Continuous and Professional Studies and the Rutgers University Center for Management Development.
I worked on the “customer side” for American Express and on the “agency side” as digital director of Omnicom’s fitness consulting organization group and senior vice president of digital strategy at McCann Worldorganization/MRM Worldwide. My new York career with McKinsey