Fraud Is Pervasive In Programmatic Video Ads; Programmatic Held Back By A Lack Of Understanding

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Badvertising Report

“Video ads on programmatic exchanges – where there is less transparency – have Invalid Traffic (IVT) rates 4.5x direct buys,” according to comScore’s Q1 2016 advertising report. ComScore also finds about half of all ads “don’t have the opportunity to be seen.” The stat underscores the complexity of a system riddled by deliberate fraud, ad block use and situations where winning bids on premium sites are regularly lost when the ad doesn’t serve in time. And while fraud is much more manageable for display, display is also losing market share to digital video. And fraudsters are following the money.

Growing Pains

A study released by PerformanceIn on Tuesday asked 100 performance advertisers what they viewed as the biggest roadblock to industrywide programmatic adoption. Lack of advertiser understanding of the buying method ranked highest at 29.8%. About 18% agreed that fraud and viewability was the biggest roadblock, making it the second largest cause for concern. Only one in 10 advertisers believe programmatic faces no barriers at all. And publishers still are worried about putting ROI at risk while spending heavily on associated tech. “Some are wary of cannibalising higher yielding direct-sold campaigns with ‘back door’ open RTB and no revenue guarantees,” said Victoria Swainson, head of programmatic at the publisher platform 1XL. More.

Sharing The Pie

Heineken is a big Publicis Groupe client, but it still uses smaller agencies for its marketing in 40 international markets. Now, Heineken reportedly wants to consolidate those 40 agencies, Ad Age reports. Publicis is obviously a shoo-in for that business, right? Not so fast. It seems Heineken doesn’t want to throw all its eggs into one global agency basket. “Our task is always to ensure the right level of expertise across all markets. And I think no agency is uniformly capable in all markets around the world,” said Gregory Kukolj, global head of media and digital at Heineken. Marketers are trending away from the AOR model as their needs grow increasingly complex. For Publicis, which is already suffering from the loss of major accounts like Coca-Cola and P&G, sharing work with another agency could lead to greater pricing pressures. More.

IDK About SDKs

Mobile app developers are getting SDK fatigue as the number of integrations per app balloons (analytics, advertising, crash reporting, payment processing, location, social connectivity, user tracking…). A report on the Android ecosystem shows that shopping or news/magazine apps have an average of 15 SDK integrations, while games are closer to 20. Google, of course, dominates the market, as the two most prominent SDK hookups (the Play Store and the AdMob app monetization product) are both Google properties. More at VentureBeat.

Personalish Identifying Information

The EU formalized some changes to the data and privacy regulations effective in 2018. The most significant change involves the definition of PII. The new EU rules define personal data as “any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, online identifier.” That definition encompasses all the indirect identifiers that can still lead a marketer to an individual consumer. More at ExchangeWire.