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The world can be divided up into two types of advertising. DR (Direct Response) or Branding/Awareness. The goal of DR is drive an immediate action, for ex. a p

by mtanski 10y ago

The world can be divided up into two types of advertising. DR (Direct Response) or Branding/Awareness. The goal of DR is drive an immediate action, for ex. a purchase or news letter signup. Branding/Awareness is more about keeping the brand/product top of mind for the eventual time when the purchasing is actually done. Usually small and mid-sized advertisers focus on DR. That's why you see a lot of re-targeting type ads for buying products you abandoned in your shopping cart (exception: large ecommerce). Then you have large advertisers like the Fortune 500 and beyond. They know that you're not making the purchase right there. Hardly any toothpaste, car, $25k server ads or retirement account ads lead to a conversion instantaneously. This is Branding/Product advertising. The hope is to keep their product top-of-mind so you'll consider it when you're driving by the dealership or in the toothpaste isle at Target. This is like your traditional newspaper advertising. Traditional KPIs like CPA used in DR ads don't make sense here. And, due to fraud CPC and CTR are not that useful. A lot of brand/product advertisements don't have a good instantaneous KPI and measuring long term ROI for a year long $25k server campaign is nebulous art at best. So to wrap up this story. The guys running this fraud operation were spoofing "premium" video sites with $13.00+ average CPMs (this is high); they were going for the most expensive inventory. The people buying ads on "premium" video sites are not DR advertisers. The goal was to capture Branding/Product advertisers dollars. It's a bit of a misconception that all online advertising is ROI focused. This was true maybe 4 years ago. With younger audiences (40 and under) consuming more video content online versus linear television there's been in a influx of branding dollars coming "premium" online video. (Disclosure: My company Adfin provided data for financial estimate for this anti-fraud operation done by WhiteOps)

anamoulous 10y ago
The frusturating thing about this is how obvious it should be that the publisher account getting paid for the impression is _not_ the premium publisher that it said it was. If your account with, say, AppNexus is registered to "Mikhail Gorsky's Ad Fraud Ring" and it's registering video plays on espn.com/video at a $30 CPM, there are some very very basic heuristics that AppNexus could run to determine there is something off about this arrangement.
- mtanski 10y ago
  That's my personal position. The vendors that are letting the supply in (SSPs and exchanges) should do more to verify the supply. This could verifying their supply id with provided domain (would get rid of a lot of crappy arbitrage). Additional verification on new suppliers who are generating more traffic. And longer net payment terms for new suppliers to allow for clawing some of it back. The problem is that many vendors are unwilling to do that. In many cases because they still make money on fraudulent traffic / arbitrage that goes through their platform. Or because they tend to be more accepting of bad data, because adtech is so duct tapped together. People setup their tags/campaigns incorrectly, adservers re-wrap urls, other incorrect rewrapping (fraud/viewablity/attribution), bad javascript, bad publisher sites and hostile browser environments. So they default to be more accepting to not lose on that revenue.
rinze 10y ago
> younger audiences (40 and under) Thank you.

by mtanski 10y ago

anamoulous 10y ago

The frusturating thing about this is how obvious it should be that the publisher account getting paid for the impression is _not_ the premium publisher that it said it was. If your account with, say, AppNexus is registered to "Mikhail Gorsky's Ad Fraud Ring" and it's registering video plays on espn.com/video at a $30 CPM, there are some very very basic heuristics that AppNexus could run to determine there is something off about this arrangement.

mtanski 10y ago
That's my personal position. The vendors that are letting the supply in (SSPs and exchanges) should do more to verify the supply. This could verifying their supply id with provided domain (would get rid of a lot of crappy arbitrage). Additional verification on new suppliers who are generating more traffic. And longer net payment terms for new suppliers to allow for clawing some of it back. The problem is that many vendors are unwilling to do that. In many cases because they still make money on fraudulent traffic / arbitrage that goes through their platform. Or because they tend to be more accepting of bad data, because adtech is so duct tapped together. People setup their tags/campaigns incorrectly, adservers re-wrap urls, other incorrect rewrapping (fraud/viewablity/attribution), bad javascript, bad publisher sites and hostile browser environments. So they default to be more accepting to not lose on that revenue.

rinze 10y ago

> younger audiences (40 and under) Thank you.