Fighting CTV Fraud: The Urgent Need for Shared Risk and Shared Responsibility
Fraud is a major issue in the CTV ad marketplace.
And while there are different estimates for how much it costs advertisers (and the broader industry at large), it’s an issue that plagues what’s arguably one of the fastest-growing revenue streams for publishers of all kinds.
Some of it is intentional.
Bot networks exist to impersonate humans and get paid for fake views. Resellers and aggregators mislabel cheap, shitty, autoplay videos that load way below the fold with the sound off as “premium” impressions.
On the other hand, much of it is not.
The system of pipes that connect all the devices (set-top boxes, Roku dongles, smart TVs …) to all the different sources of content (apps like Netflix and Peacock, or FAST channel aggregators and vMVPDs) and all the different sources of demand (DSPs, SSPs, ad servers and more) is definitely complex.
And while there are IAB Tech Lab-backed standards for transparency like app-ads.txt and sellers.json, there’s still lots of room for interpretation (and unintentional mislabeling) of specific types of inventory.
There are also differences in the way that companies identify fraud, as evidenced by the MRC’s 10 page response to the Adlytics fraud “bombshell” launched earlier this year. And let’s not forget the contractually-dictated business arrangements that are sometimes at odds with requests for “transparency” in the bidstream.
All of that’s to say I don’t think there’s a cabal of pubs or platforms actively seeing out ways to scam advertisers into buying low quality (or even non-existent) CTV inventory.
But who should be responsible when it is intentional?
Clearly, the company (or companies) perpetuating the fraud should be held to account. The problem is that the nature of ad tech makes it hard to identify the source.
And that’s why one of the anti-fraud solutions that came up during a CIMM East panel piqued my interest.:
The session – Combatting CTV’s Billion Dollar Dirty Little Secret: Ad Fraud – featured POVs from industry leaders like Freewheel’s Chief Strategy Officer, Soo Jin Oh, and Simulmedia CEO Dave Morgan. Let’s just say the discussion got spicy.
One proposal that stood out: enforcing strict Know Your Customer (KYC) rules -- akin to the measures banks and other financial institutions have to take to ensure that they’re not enabling money laundering or other crimes.
As the panelists talked through these and other proposed solutions, the question that immediately came to mind for me was: Who’s going to pay for this? Followed shortly by: Is this another expense that pubs would have to eat first?
And the discussion even got covered by Adexchanger, Ad Age and Mediapost -- not just because it was real talk (the caliber of conversation we pride ourselves on curating at CIMM events … ), but also because panelists addressed two of the misaligned incentives from the buy side that could unknowingly be supporting fraud. Specifically:
Buyers looking for cheap access to premium inventory,
And the hunt for guaranteed audiences, regardless of where they’re found.
So are buyers unknowingly supporting bad actors?
In some cases yes … and that’s why CTV ad fraud solutions like KYC programs need to involve ramifications for both the buy side and sell side. They shouldn’t just come at the expense of publishers and media owners alone.
There should be shared risk and shared responsibility for fraud in the CTV ecosystem, similar to the way the cloud services industry operates.
In cloud computing, the shared responsibility model essentially means that the cloud provider — like Amazon Web Service (AWS) or Microsoft Azure — has to monitor and respond to threats related to the cloud and its underlying infrastructure. Meanwhile, the end users (people and companies) are responsible for protecting the data they actually store in the cloud environment.
Applying that model to CTV might look like ensuring that platforms -- the ad servers, the exchanges, the SSPs, DSPs, CDPs, ad verification platforms, etc. -- take the brunt of the risk to ensure the inventory they’re procuring (or curating, packaging, etc.) is valid.
But then the sellers and buyers also need to be responsible for ensuring a few things:
Each party knows who they’re buying from (or selling to)
The inventory (or audiences) transacted on is actually what was promised
Now I have to admit that I’m biased on behalf of publishers.
I got my start in ad tech working with a variety of SSPs, and I will always have a soft spot for media companies trying to build a business producing great content. But I think some version of the shared risk and shared responsibility model -- or at least a more equitable distribution of risk between platforms, sell side and buy side -- is crucial if we’re going to really tackle the issue of ad fraud in CTV.
Punishing pubs inadvertently by making them pay for yet another form of verification doesn’t seem equitable (or sustainable) in the long run.
But what do you think?
Let me know on LinkedIn or feel free to email me directly. I’d love to hear your POV.
Tameka Kee is the inaugural guest columnist for "The Hot Take" in Fastener’s The Hot Fix newsletter. A longtime ad tech expert, journalist and publisher advocate, she currently serves as Senior Vice President at the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM).
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