Digital Ad Fraud: Turning the tide with FouAnalytics

Daniel Courtenay, MultiChoice’s Executive Head of Group Digital Marketing

Over the last 30 years, the internet has changed the entertainment industry landscape. ‘Digital’ has facilitated the rapid growth of content theft - illicit pirated movies, TV shows, and other content - infringing copyrights and taking profits away from creators. ‘Digital’ has also facilitated the global criminal activity known as ad fraud – ads shown to fake users, bots, and ads shown on fake sites and sites using pirated content to attract audiences. For the entertainment industry, this is effectively a ‘triple-whammy’ – the loss of audiences to piracy sites, of profits to creators, and advertising dollars that inadvertently flow to piracy sites, thus funding further criminal activity.

Digital ad fraud is the single biggest threat affecting advertisers in every industry, who spend enormous sums on digital advertising. Globally, digital ad spending has passed the US$500-billion mark annually. These dollars are replenished every year, making it a very attractive soft target for criminal organisations, large and small. Ad fraud also poses a significant threat to the brand reputations of organisations. For example, when their ads appear on unsavoury websites they wouldn’t typically choose to be associated with.

Digital ad fraud is not a new problem. In 2004, Google’s former CFO George Reyes said that fraud was the biggest threat to the internet economy. In 2016 the World Federation of Advertisers published its first guidance on ad fraud, advising its members to act aggressively to counter the problem, allegedly eating close to US$20 billion of its members’ ad budgets. Market research company eMarketer estimates that digital ad fraud will cost the industry US$100 billion by 2023.

Existing anti-fraud solutions have been unable to keep up with the exponential growth of this illicit industry. A 2021 report by the Digital Citizens Alliance, a US-based consumer-focused group that raises awareness on issues around internet safety, revealed that piracy sites stole more than US$227 million in digital ad dollars in 2013, with that number quadrupling in 2021 to US$1.34 billion.

MultiChoice Group is one of the pioneering major brand advertisers in Africa leading the charge against ad-supported piracy and digital ad fraud. The group has adopted and is using

Global, to measure all digital ad campaigns and all websites. FouAnalytics is an analytics platform for monitoring programmatic ads and websites. It can detect fraud committed by sites and mobile apps and enables companies to add these sites to block lists. Initial data has revealed that nearly 40% of ads in our programmatic display campaigns have gone to suspicious or fraudulent sites and apps. With FouAnalytics, we took immediate action by adding these sites and apps to block lists to optimise campaigns. Over the coming year, our investment in FouAnalytics will empower us to optimise away from fraudulent digital properties towards better marketing outcomes. We have engaged our business analytics teams to study the impact of reducing ads flowing to fraudulent sites and piracy sites on our business results over the coming months.

We are only beginning this journey to better understand digital ad fraud using FouAnalytics. As a broadcaster, we need to ensure that our content creators are adequately protected. At the same time we strive to understand the impact of ad fraud on our business outcomes and digital marketing performance. Hopefully, our example will inspire others to tackle ad fraud more aggressively by actively using analytics in their digital media campaigns.