Advertising fraud will be a $100 billion problem – and soon

advertising fraud
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Advertising sales are not only slowing but advertising fraud is rising, fast. As techniques from fraudsters become more sophisticated, advertising networks are feeling the pain.

Juniper Research estimates that advertising fraud losses will reach $42 billion in 2019 and reach a staggering $100 billion by 2023, just four years away.

The company believes that fraudsters are developing techniques that can spoof advertising networks to falsify ad clicks and display ads, which is really rather more sophisticated and damaging than employing people to click on adverts or playing around with app install farms.

Another front is opening in the battle, making matters even worse. Advertising on ‘OTT’ TV services will exceed $42 billion by 2023 and the lack of standardisation among these service providers exposes them, too, to increased levels of fraud.

If this is the case then the advertising world is being dealt another significant blow.

Advertisers are not going to entrust their investments to networks that are not completely secure and with large companies already becoming increasingly creative with their own products and how to reach their audience, where will they go from here?

If you add this challenge to the already game changing challenge of data privacy then it is hard to see how someone or something might save the day.

People no longer like or trust advertising, particularly the kind that follows you around social media, the web and your life, offering you deals on things that you just bought or things that you do not need.

Flawed as the dear old GDPR is – no-one takes the slightest notice and most Government departments are not compliant – it raises public awareness of the intrusive and annoying nature of most advertising and sends a message that the public can do something about it.

The result could be a ‘double whammy’ where advertisers do not trust advertising networks – thus the dwindling sales – and people get more and more annoyed with daily emails offering everything from fishing equipment to diaries. Eventually it will reach breaking point.

It would, at least, be a much more peaceful world if advertising all but disappeared but its disappearance would impact so much of our world that this solution will not be allowed to happen. The internet and everything that it enables would need to be reinvented.

Wait – now there’s an idea.

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