Stopping OTT Ad Fraud In Its Tracks…Before It’s Too Late

It’s time to face the facts; wherever there is digital advertising today, there is bound to be some sort of fraud. Just look at the $129B digital advertising industry, that will lose roughly $19B to fraud in 2019. But when it comes to digital, the problems stem from the underlying infrastructure, which will require a complete overhaul of the framework in order to truly remedy the situation. Fortunately, we can still learn from the mistakes made in display to ensure the problems don’t plague emerging platforms.

For advertisers, OTT is quickly becoming an essential part of the marketing mix for a variety of reasons, including the precision targeting capabilities of digital migrating to the TV screen and ad completion rates in the high 90th percentile. This convergence of TV and digital is giving brands the best of both worlds, resulting in OTT ad spend expected to grow to $5 billion by 2020.

While many advertisers are often blinded by the new shiny object in the room, it’s essential the industry takes the necessary precautions to ensure fraud doesn’t end up infesting OTT. A recent MadHive study analyzed more than 1B OTT ad requests and found that 18% were fraudulent. The worst part? The predominant types of fraud leading the charge on OTT were similar to that found on digital. The only way to stop fraud in its tracks is by leveraging cutting edge technologies like AI, cryptography and blockchain to identify and eliminate suspicious inventory.

Here are the full findings:

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