Ad fraud to hit $42bn in 2019, $100bn by 2023

Industry Contributor 26 May 2019 - 2 min read

Ad fraud to hit $42bn in 2019, $100bn by 2023

By Paul McIntyre - Executive Editor

Market Voice 3 min read

How to use generative AI beyond efficiency: Just talk to it for half an hour every week – OK Tomorrow founder Nilesh Ashra

By Nine | Partner Content

OK Tomorrow founder Nilesh Ashra is convinced AI can unlock the creative floodgates, and has some cracking examples covering customer, product and HR. But media and marketing appear to be running headlong for efficiency.

Market Voice 3 min read

Advanced Audiences: Nielsen makes synthetic, first-party data play as CMOs prioritise customer lifetime value, optimise marketing technology investments, and navigate changes in privacy laws

By Nielsen | Partner Content

Audience measurement company, Nielsen, is becoming a first-party marketing company, working directly with brands to build privacy-compliant customer segments – panel data that is synthetically overlaid with brands’ customer data platform (CDP) data.

Tags: ad fraud, juniper networks, digital advertising, marketing, nestle, P&G, Diageo, Unilever, Samsung,

Digital ad fraud will increase 21% in 2019 to $42bn according to Juniper Networks. The company’s latest white paper predicts ad fraud will accelerate to $100bn by 2023 (Juniper Networks).

Key points:

North America is the biggest market for ad fraudsters (>40%), followed by Far East and China, and Western Europe
Fraudsters moving towards advanced techniques such as spoofing advertising networks to falsify ad clicks and displayed ads, rather than labour-intensive activities such as app install farms
Juniper forecasts OTT (Over-the-Top) TV ad spend will exceed $42 billion by 2023, up 50% from $28bn forecast for 2019
But lack of OTT TV standardisation makes it easier for fraudsters to spoof networks, leaving advertisers exposed to higher rates of fraud
The paper also predicts Amazon’s AI powered advertising platform to take further dollars from Google and Facebook in 2019 – and that AI will drive up cost per ad from 2020

Juniper thinks privacy issues will start to bite from 2021 as regulatory action comes into force

Ad fraud is booming and if Juniper’s figures are right, will siphon off 13% of all digital ad dollars this year. That’s broadly equivalent to the combined global annual revenues of Publicis, Omnicom and WPP – and an order of magnitude higher than their profits. Or almost the collective global annual ad spend of Samsung, P&G, L’Oreal, Unilever and Nestlé.

What should worry brands is that despite all the attention on ad fraud and its second cousin, transparency, the problem has got worse. Much worse. Over the next four years, Juniper predicts rates of ad fraud will increase 2.5 times, making it by far the fastest growing part of the advertising ecosystem.

It’s little wonder big advertisers such as Diageo, P&G, Nestle and Vodafone are trying to create their own safe spaces via trusted publisher networks. The problem is, should they succeed in stemming the outflow of dollars to fraudsters, every other advertiser might find that the criminals double down on easier pickings.