Last year is well known as a year in which bots, domain spoofing, and brand risk became increasingly troublesome. Bot networks, for example, have been found to create false clicks while other scams have been created to inflate fees that advertisers pay. Some estimates claim that advertisers even waste billions of dollars annually because of advertising fraud.
With that in mind, 2018 is shaping up to be a year in which tech vendors wage a battle against those concerns. Adjust, which is a mobile app measurement company, maintains that up to 80% of mobile phone app installations are really SDK spoofing frauds, reports MarTechAdvisor.
With SDK spoofing, scammers install software in mobile devices. The scammers then claim that the software is a legitimate app and then charge advertisers for the installations. With the high percentage of bogus installations, advertisers could be wasting up to 80% of their advertising budgets. Adjust has created a signature hash that the company says can prevent SDK spoofing. It is making the hash available to all of its customers.
Kochava, which provides measurement solutions for connected devices, is also seeking to address concerns regarding mobile advertising fraud. It has recently rolled out its Checksum service that validates app installations and it has added three more views to its Fraud Console suite, reports MarTechSeries.
Checksum will drop apps that cannot be verified prior to the start of campaigns. The company also maintains that its Fraud Console uses automation and algorithms that can identify patterns and flag suspicious activity for review. Receptiv, which offers a mobile video advertising platform, is seeking to cash in on concerns over brand safety and fraud, reports MediaPost. The company recently rolled out a three-part guarantee for advertisers. It guarantees that its video inventory is reliable, brand safe, and engaging.
Brand safety concerns swelled last year after big advertisers, including Verizon and Walmart, pulled their ads from YouTube after they discovered that their content was appearing next to videos promoting extremist views or hate speech.
Receptiv seeks to avoid that problem by doing more than just abiding by Apple and Google’s mobile app store policies. Receptiv says it vets content with a rigorous review as part of its two-week onboarding process. It also maintains that its platform is free of bots that could potentially distort viewership data.
Many advertisers, however, have failed to take action to enhance brand safety, according to a recent study by GumGum. The company uses artificial intelligence and machine vision technology to protect brand safety. Based on a study that the company conducted in November with DigiDay, more than two thirds of marketers say their brands have been exposed to brand safety issues, reports eMarketer.
More than half of marketers, furthermore, said their brands had suffered from safety issues at least twice. Among respondents, the most frequent types of inappropriate content that accompanied brands’ advertisements were disasters/tragedies, divisive politics and fake news. Nearly one third of respondents also said their content had appeared too close to content from competitors.
Brands ranked Facebook as the least safe and LinkedIn as the least dangerous. GumGum maintains that marketers can do more to protect their brands. In addition to using machine image technology, brands can use keyword detection to filter out publisher content with unwanted topics. Publisher blacklists and whitelists can also be used to protect brand safety.
