A while ago I wrote about the problem of online ad fraud, and how it meant that online advertisers were literally handing billions of dollars in ad spend to scammers and cyber criminals. They didn’t know that of course, and frankly, as long as they had some nice big juicy numbers around impressions and unique views to show to the bosses, they didn’t particularly care either.
One study found that only 23% of B2B marketers at companies with more than 500 employees were very concerned about ad fraud, and 14% were unconcerned. In addition, only 18% cited ad fraud and invalid traffic as the most significant digital display advertising challenge, placing it at the bottom of the list.
The lack of conversion to sales should have been a giveaway, but there you go.
So how big a problem is Ad-fraud?
According to Juniper Research, as reported by Search Engine Land, it’s estimated that $84 billion of ad spend was wasted due to ad-fraud in 2023—a number is expected to increase to $172 billion by 2028. Ad-fraud comprises all sorts of things including click and impression fraud, ad stacking, domain spoofing, the use of bots and more.
As I went further down the ‘dodgy marketing data’ rabbit hole I came across an article that was arguably more alarming.
Criminality is one thing, but what if the whole foundations of the data used in online marketing were built on quicksand?
Well, the former privacy chief of global media behemoth UM – Arielle Garcia – put a big fat cat among a whole flock of pigeons when she opined that the $700bn global digital ad industry is founded on trading “useless, garbage data”.
Aside from being an industry insider for more than a decade, what really convinced her something was wrong was when she accessed her own profile from ad-tech vendors.
According to Garcia, she was in “500 different audience segments across seven different data brokers, and what I saw was just a bunch of contradictory, useless, garbage data.”
Specifically, according to the ad-tech vendors, Garcia:
- was both a man and a woman,
- worked in food service, and agriculture, and was also a defence contractor, and an engineer
- was simultaneously below the poverty threshold and classified as high income.
All of which makes you wonder, are you actually targeting who you think you are. Are you actually reaching ‘fake people’?
Normally at this point, I would do some seamless segue into how Ensombl has some wonderful solution to the problem I had just written about.
Old habits, as they say, die hard, so I will take this opportunity to say that the quality of our data is very high.
It goes deep, based on all the engagement that happens across the Ensombl platform every day, 9,000 users asking and answering questions, liking, sharing, viewing. And our CEO – no less – has literally spent hundreds of hours validating that data, meaning with our user avatars you can’t be both a practice principal and an employed adviser and a support person. You can only be one.
And if you are in the business of targeted marketing, that’s not fool’s gold, it’s the real deal.
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