Last year there was some good news for the ad tech industry when the Association of National Advertisers announced that they believed ad fraud would drop from $7.2 billion in 2016 to $6.5 billion in 2017.

But soon thereafter new facts came to light that told a different story.

Adobe inspected traffic across thousands of its client sites and found that 28 percent of the traffic showed "non-human signals" indicating that it was fraudulent. Bob Hoffman of The Ad Contrarian calculated, based on this fact, that ad fraud may reach $66 billion in 2018, which is 10 times more than the $6.5 billion predicted for 2017 by the ANA.

So, who can you believe?

It's possible that the safeguards put in place by programmatic trading platforms, and ads.txt, which requires publishers to list authorized buyers, could be having a positive impact. But even if these initiatives are whittling away at the problem, there is another possibility that the fraudsters have simply gotten better at covering their tracks. Online fraud might, in fact, be growing but we just can't see it.

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Ad fraud cost the newspaper industry an estimated $8 billion in losses in 2017. The question for publishers has changed from "Are you losing revenue due to ad fraud?" to "How much revenue are you losing due to ad fraud?"

In addition to highlighting some case studies at the Key Executives Mega-Conference, highlights will be shared on the Solutions Stage from a recent study conducted by Dev/Con Detect, on the top 2,000 ranked Alexa news sites, benchmarking what percent of those sites had vulnerabilities to ad fraud, what types of fraud and tips.

Casey Hester, vice president, customer success with Dev/Con Detect, says: "Most cybersecurity companies working in media and advertising are focused on blocking bots and malware that only treat the symptoms. Our technology and indexing identifies the exact hijacked ad slots, ad-injections, and networks allowing 'spammy,' low-quality ads."

The Mega-Conference will be held Feb. 26-28 in San Diego, Calif.

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Dealer.com, a Cox Automotive brand, and White Ops, a market leader in automated threat prevention, have announced a partnership to combat advertising fraud that will enable a superior return on investment for automotive industry advertisers. Dealer.com is the first automotive-focused advertising provider to partner with White Ops.

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By Tom Drouillard, CEO, president and managing director, Alliance for Audited Media

Losses from digital ad fraud range from $6 billion to $16 billion annually, and the current supply chain structure makes it easy and attractive to commit ad fraud with little chance of retribution. Marketers, agencies, publishers and technology suppliers are frustrated. Trust is at an all-time low. The industry is nearing crisis stage as marketers are seriously questioning, rethinking and redoing their digital investments.

How do we solve the ad fraud crisis? By recognizing three truths.

Read more from Tom Drouillard, CEO, president and managing director, Alliance for Audited Media.

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