The Digital Industry Wants to Woo Traditional TV Ad Dollars

Connected TV viewership has arguably been the media industry's biggest success since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and marketers are expected to spend $17 billion to serve ads to those audiences next year. As with most forms of new media, however, the nascent nature of the platform has also attracted the attention of fraudsters seeking to defraud marketers of their paid-for media dollars, which some fear could stall the forecasted increase in spend. To counter this, the IAB Tech Lab is proposing a series of tech standards to win marketer confidence and further entice ad dollars away from traditional TV screens, including dusting off ads.cert, a verification standard that debuted as part of OpenRTB 3.0 but failed to gain scaled pickup. IAB Tech Lab hopes the surge in popularity of CTV and concerns around the menace of ad fraud will reinvigorate support for ads.cert. And its recently launched Transparency Center is designed to further curb criminals. Exploiting CTV loopholes Fraudsters are attracted to CTV predominantly because of the larger sums of money to be made, compared with generating invalid traffic on fake desktop websites where anti-fraud measures are more mature. They exploit flaws in the intricacies of CTV ad serving—known as server-side ad insertion (SSAI)—where ads are loaded in bulk to minimize the disruption of the viewing experience. SSAI opens a loophole for fraudsters to hide among the myriad of inventory reselling agreements on ad exchanges in order to defraud advertisers of their funds, with popular methods including emulating valid traffic or spoofing valid premium websites. This manner of ad serving means the verification methods developed for the desktop environment, where publishers declare authorized resellers of their inventory in an ad auction, can't be applied. Ads.cert is a tech standard that cryptographically authenticates resellers of premium video ad inventory in real time. IAB's hope is that widespread adoption of this standard will patch up loopholes in its earlier proposed means of fraud prevention. Although it was first unveiled in 2017, ads.cert has yet to reach scale primarily because the accompanying OpenRTB 3.0 protocol requires a significant overhaul of a company's programmatic infrastructure. Few have had the resources necessary for such an undertaking, especially for a standard that is not compatible with earlier versions of the OpenRTB protocol. Anthony Katsur, the recently installed CEO of IAB Tech Lab, told Adweek the relaunch of ads.cert will come in the closing quarter of 2021, and the trade body is planning a sustained investment to aid adoption. "We're looking to get ... every RTB transaction between buyer and seller cryptographically signed," he said. According to Katsur, providing such assurances to further the migration of ad dollars from linear to CTV would be a key priority over the next 10 years. "We want to support legitimate SSAI vendors that are actually serving legitimate ads," he explained. "If we do not have strong protocols enforced by the industry, those ad dollars are not going anywhere." Scare tactics stalling progress The lack of consensus over tech standards makes it difficult to assess the true financial impact of CTV ad fraud, and several experts told Adweek that absence will only hold back progress. Meanwhile, CTV ad fraud is increasingly gaining airtime, with scams such as IceBucket, Pareto and SmokeScreen demonstrating the ease with which fraudsters can siphon funds from the industry. For instance, fraud-prevention consultancy Method Media Intelligence recently rooted out a scheme dubbed RapidFire that saw a small team of fraudsters hoodwink advertisers out of $20 million per month. Several sources told Adweek that, at present, it is difficult for media buyers to programmatically purchase quality CTV ad inventory at scale, especially on the open markets, such as ad exchanges. This is because most premium CTV inventory is traded as part of the annual upfront negotiations or purchased directly by a media buyer from a TV network via an orthodox insertion order. Ruben Schreurs, chief product officer at consultancy firm Ebiquity, described the current CTV landscape as a "splinter-web of proprietary platforms" that lacks standardization sought by those in the market for premium CTV ad inventory. "Programmatically buying effective advertising at scale on top-tier content is nearly impossible at this stage," he said, adding that horror stories around fraud are likely to lead to the continuation of manual CTV ad trading. Fraud Prevention Tactics Source: Omnicom Media Group To further mitigate against fraud, Omnicom Media Group has developed a certification program for buyers across all its agencies to help clients better protect their ad dollars: Educate your organization on fraud, common attack vectors and areas of risk across all areas of the supply chain.Develop strong 1:1 relationships with content makers, device manufacturers and service providers.Access CTV inventory through vetted private methods, not on the open exchange.Demand more transparency and granularity from your platforms and partners.Partner with fraud verification companies to develop new detection methods for fighting fraud. Sourcing quality Jean-Christophe Peube, svp analytics and customer experience at Smart AdServer, said improved adoption of ads.cert should improve the "traceability" necessary to encourage providers of quality CTV inventory, such as traditional TV networks, to trade programmatically on open exchanges. Shailin Dhar, CEO and founder of Method Media Intelligence, explained how his company developed an offering to better verify valid CTV ad requests in more closed programmatic trading environments (known as private marketplaces, or PMPs). "We've studied CTV bid requests to validate the legitimate ones and block the garbage ones," he explained. "Over the last couple of weeks, we've been trying to integrate with ad exchanges to get all the advertisers to buy in to target clean CTV inventory." In the interim, media buyers are starting to cut preferential deals with select CTV inventory providers so they can demand better quality assurances from their programmatic partners. Diana Romero, digital standards and partnerships manager at Publicis Media, said her outfit is brokering such deals as suppliers of quality CTV inventory sell out very quickly. "We try to do that through our PM CTV co-op [from Publicis Media Exchange]," she said. "This allows us to access CTV inventory at scale and also allows us to leverage the power of pricing negotiations." Similarly, Omnicom Media Group has also started requesting guaranteed outcomes from inventory providers earlier this year by trading CTV inventory through its curated marketplace in the U.S. "Direct relationships are critical to the fraud mitigation strategy the buyer needs to have," explained Ryan Eusanio, managing director, digital activation at Omnicom Media Group. "Where you get into trouble with CTV is when you start buying from sellers and sources that you don't recognize." Joe Barone, managing partner, brand safety, Americas, at GroupM, said the standards proposed by the IAB Tech Lab are necessary when it comes to winning marketers' confidence over programmatic trading. The current lack of standards has led to the endemic miscounted CTV ad impressions, he said, similar to the challenges faced by Nielsen in the linear TV space, which also leads to a lot of wasted client budgets. "When it comes to invalid traffic, the most important thing is just counting correctly," he said. "We always think of intent and insidious intent when we think of fraud and there's plenty of it, but there's also a lot of just bad counting."

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