Digital advertising has grown exponentially in the last decade, largely thanks to programmatic sales and real-time bidding (RTB). As we discussed in our previous blog post, the OpenRTB protocol has been crucial in this growth, serving as the fundamental pillar of communication between advertisers and publishers for the buying and selling of advertising inventory in an advantageous and profitable way for all involved parties.
However, not everything is without challenges. Significant hurdles remain, as technological evolution inherently involves constant change. The automation of most programmatic sales processes means that these mechanisms need tools to ensure transparency and legality in all transactions, preventing the fraud that often occurs in this space.
Particularly in CTV, advertising fraud is becoming a problem due to market fragmentation and the lack of standardization. This highlights the critical importance of adopting all the solutions we will discuss below to prevent advertising fraud.
Let’s explore the main tools currently available:
As we mentioned earlier, the so-called spoofing (inventory falsification) is one of the biggest challenges faced by CTV inventory. Fraudsters pretend to represent premium inventory from well-known streaming services to trick advertisers into buying it, when in fact, this is not the case.
Another increasingly common practice is the falsification of streaming apps that generate substantial traffic, sometimes even at very high levels, and generate high advertising revenue. However, the content is neither legitimate nor obtained legally.
Another common practice is the injection of ads where they shouldn’t be, such as in content streams that are not actually being shown to any user. These ads are played on emulated devices that mimic real connected TVs, and ultimately generate revenue, as the technology is still unable to detect whether anyone is viewing the ad.
All of these tools are connected and used within the RTB protocol to provide a transparent and verifiable system for programmatic advertising transactions, ensuring that the entities involved in the auction are legitimate. When a DSP receives a bid request, the proper way to ensure the process runs smoothly without fraud is by consulting the ads.txt and Sellers.json files to verify that the parameters added to the supply chain are correct and that no false data is present, ensuring that all intermediaries and sellers are authorized and trustworthy.
It is crucial to keep these files updated to prevent cybercriminals from exploiting gaps in these standards to act illegally, impersonating identities or even applications to redirect advertising budgets to their servers, where the end user never sees the ads, but where technology platforms are unable to detect fraud. In the end, the budget would be consumed, and each dollar spent would benefit these criminals.
Several measures are being developed and tested to prevent fraud in the advertising ecosystem:
Given all of the above, we can conclude that it is essential to continue developing and maintaining these tools and standards to ensure their relevance and broader adoption in the market.
At tvads we has a professional team able to advise you on this field and and guide you in any area of your streaming advertising business, advising you or even operating it on your behalf if necessary
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