Are marketers and media agencies as complacent about ad fraud as they seem?

BY Tim Burrowes

June 18, 2024 10:52

Are marketers and media agencies as complacent about ad fraud as they seem?

Welcome to a midweek update from Unmade. Today, with digital ad fraud on the rise, why do local marketers and media agencies seem to care about it so little?

If you’ve been thinking about upgrading to an Unmade membership, this is the perfect time. Your membership includes:

Member-only pricing for our HumAIn and REmade (October 1) conferences;
A complimentary invitation to Unmade’s Compass event (November);
Member-only content and our paywalled archives;
Your own copy of Media Unmade.

Why isn’t ad fraud a bigger deal?

Back when I was an owner of Mumbrella, we signed up for every media audit going.

Online audience? We were one of the first B2B publishers to sign up for web audits. Email list? Ditto. Conference attendance? We were the very first in Australia.

Nobody cared.

I don’t think we sold a single extra advertising campaign. Indeed, I never heard of a potential advertiser or sponsor asking a hard question of our sales team about our media kit.

Meanwhile, we’d see some of our competitors make outlandish claims, and similarly not get challenged on them.

I began to wonder: If this was the microcosm of a media-savvy set of advertisers, just how much complacency was there in the wider media world?

We got our answer in 2018 when the three biggest magazine publishers simultaneously withdrew from the Audited Media Association of Australia’s circulation audits. There was barely a ripple from media agencies or marketers. The AMAA finally killed off its print and digital audits altogether in April of this year.

Ditto when the TV networks killed off much of the information they release about show performance in January this year. Want to know how Nine News did against Seven News in Sydney last night? You won’t be able to read about it unless you pay for an OzTam subscription.

The platforms have changed, but I’m not sure marketers and their media agencies care any more now. When did you last meet a marketer losing sleep about their connected TV fraud rate?

Today saw the publication of DoubleVerify’s annual report into the shifting trends in the performance of advertising media.

As a market, Australia does badly. The rate of fraud in Australia and New Zealand rose by 14 percentage points to 1.3% overall, DV says. ANZ has the second worse fraud rate in ANZ.

Source: DoubleVerify Global Insights 2024

ANZ does similarly badly on other metrics . We’re the only location in APAC which scores below DoubleVerify’s global baselines on attention, engagement and exposure.

Admittedly, I am sceptical about some of those who push the idea that attention metrics should be the next trading currency. Nonetheless, I’d rather have an ad that people pay attention to than not.

What is it about the local marketing culture that means there’s so little outrage? Perhaps they’ll get to it when they’ve finished drinking rose in Cannes.

Unmade discussed ad fraud on our podcast a fortnight ago:

Broadcasters struggle on another down day

Australia’s broadcasters had the worst of it on the Unmade Index on Tuesday with Nine, ARN Media and Southern Cross Austereo all taking new hits to their market capitalisations.

ARN shed 4.2% from what was already an all-time low market capitalisation. And Southern Cross Austereo lost another 3% off its record low.

Meanwhile Nine shed 2.5%, taking it close to the four-year low point it hit last week. Seven, which is also trading close to a low point, stayed flat yesterday. In the US, Paramount Global – owner of Network Ten – hit its lowest price since 2009.