Brand safety is at the forefront of many advertisers’ minds these days—as it should be. Being adjacent to or associated with the right content is what most people think of when they hear the term “brand safety.” But for many, it also means finding ways to avoid fraud. Fraud wastes ad dollars (bots don’t buy toothpaste; real people exposed to ads do) and supports bad actors, so it benefits the industry and consumers to mitigate fraud.
The anti-fraud fight can seem a bit like a black box at times, so how does SXM Media approach staying ahead of the bots? Check out this four-step plan.
Prioritize
There are usually some easy wins when it comes to fighting digital ad fraud, and that low-hanging fruit is what you want to harvest in step one. This includes setting up what would be considered the current table stakes: monitoring all ad inventory for invalid traffic (or IVT), removing any detected IVT from billable impressions, ensuring clients have a mechanism to monitor their buys for IVT, and implementing industry tools designed to prevent or detect IVT. Without the basics, failure is imminent.
Fighting fraud is an ultramarathon. Because you can’t do everything at once, you have to prioritize the implementation of your tactics. Are there any easy wins with big impacts? Start there, knock them out, then move on to tackling the harder problems. Inevitably new issues will arise. Taking measures to combat a bot attack you uncovered may use resources that are not available to help you tackle your next project. Time to reassess needs and shift plans as needed. If you aren’t continually reviewing your plans, you will waste time and energy.
Collaborate
Much of ad fraud actually has nothing to do with ads. Bots end up on a site intent on performing a task, be it benign (crawling for a search engine) or nefarious (credential stuffing). Either way, any ad “viewed” by a bot isn’t viewable by a human and is therefore IVT, negatively impacting the entire business.
Fighting fraud is an ultramarathon. Because you can’t do everything at once, you have to prioritize the implementation of your tactics.
So, how do you bust these bots? Collaboration. Get to know the different groups inside and outside of your organization, especially the security and privacy teams. Once you snag a seat at these tables, you’ll be much better equipped to battle bot fraud and safeguard your sites. Sharing best practices and real-time threats with other similar third parties may also help everyone do better, so don’t be afraid to spread the wealth. By doing so, you’re setting yourself up with the one of the best ways to fight fraud: making the economics unviable for the bad actors.
Celebrate
Fighting fraud is hard and frustrating. It’s important to find ways to stay motivated because being successful requires constant vigilance. So, celebrate those wins. Call out the good work being done. Reward great work in a way that makes sense for you and your team.
Innovate
Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of money to be had in the fraud business and the fraudsters spend a lot of money on R&D. What does that mean? The bots will keep coming and keep getting smarter.
As an industry, we need to continually evolve and develop new tactics, sometimes many at a time, to see what really hits and sticks. But remember, it’s not about landing one silver strategy. It’s about building up layers on layers of protection that work in concert to identify and mitigate the bots and the IVT they create—that’s the real secret to a solid gold defense.
