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"The most startling finding: Only 20 percent of the campaign’s “ad impressions”—ads that appear on a computer or smartphone screen—were even seen by actual peop

"The most startling finding: Only 20 percent of the campaign’s “ad impressions”—ads that appear on a computer or smartphone screen—were even seen by actual people. “The room basically stopped,” Amram recalls. The team was concerned about their jobs; someone asked, “Can they do that? Is it legal?” But mostly it was disbelief and outrage. “It was like we’d been throwing our money to the mob,” Amram says." Every time I see an account of an advertiser seeing a viewability metric, it reminds me how scare tactics always work to drive sales. Viewability tech is very nascent and is often just guessing because there are so many variables out there that can give it both false positives and false negatives. However, giving such numbers to advertisers drives sales of your tech big time, even if the number cannot be verified because it's such a scary number.

geocar 11y ago
Amram is trying to become his own brand, so I skip articles that he's got a quote in simply because he's not out to solve any problems, just get an agency job in a few years. I don't think he actually understands ad fraud at all. Here's the thing: The (Boris Boris) sites that myspace is selling are obviously crap. Absolutely worthless. The traffic he's buying is a bunch of fraud redirects, and he thinks that it's the media buyer's responsibility to be choosier. However Christopher Barnet of Myspace is selling these sites as genuine video preroll that retails at around 6-8$ per thousand views. He's selling them on ad exchanges and they're buying it like crazy because it reports as highly "viewable", it's in "demo" (meaning a lot of these users have a comScore cookie), and of course, because nobody believe's Myspace is defrauding them. So here we are: At least 80% of Myspace's ad inventory is fraud, and nobody's going to ask for their money back because "hey, we got fooled too". And life goes on.

geocar 11y ago

Amram is trying to become his own brand, so I skip articles that he's got a quote in simply because he's not out to solve any problems, just get an agency job in a few years. I don't think he actually understands ad fraud at all. Here's the thing: The (Boris Boris) sites that myspace is selling are obviously crap. Absolutely worthless. The traffic he's buying is a bunch of fraud redirects, and he thinks that it's the media buyer's responsibility to be choosier. However Christopher Barnet of Myspace is selling these sites as genuine video preroll that retails at around 6-8$ per thousand views. He's selling them on ad exchanges and they're buying it like crazy because it reports as highly "viewable", it's in "demo" (meaning a lot of these users have a comScore cookie), and of course, because nobody believe's Myspace is defrauding them. So here we are: At least 80% of Myspace's ad inventory is fraud, and nobody's going to ask for their money back because "hey, we got fooled too". And life goes on.