Despite great leaps in advertising technology, fraud is still a major problem for multi-national advertisers. One look at the LUMAscape is enough to give anyone a headache, with myriad players overlapping and conflicting one another. Every player is trying to solve one issue, and there are certainly several pieces that try to prevent one of advertisings’ biggest problems: fraud.
But what happens when fraud still creeps through? We just saw it happen to Mercedes Benz, where one campaign reached more bots than people, as reported by the Financial Times. As indicated within the FT, Mercedes and its media-buying partner used a variety of fraud-blocking services to prevent these kinds of things. The LUMAscape is at their disposal, but they couldn’t stop fraud.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Right now, many advertisers find that picking the right partners to help them get the best value from their campaigns can be a mine field, especially when the definition of a DSP, DMP or SSP (or any number of other acronyms) seems to vary wildly from one company to another. This is why so many advertisers have ended up wasting so much of their online advertising budget on fraudulent impressions.
So what is the solution? The answer lies in Enterprise Advertising Management Systems (EAMS), which eliminates the messy task of picking through assembling an ad stack from all of the partners in the slide above. An EAMS (ours is called AudienceScience Gateway) revolutionizes how global advertisers manage their data and execute their digital advertising campaigns by streamlining the process. Gateway eliminates intermediaries (aside from the planning arm of an ad agency), so the client knows exactly where their advertising budget goes.
Looking specifically at the fraud issue, Gateway filters out bot-traffic, keeping it from ever reaching the client. With Mercedes, we saw how they deployed different systems to block out suspect traffic, yet still served their ads to bots. Gateway eliminates fraud by automatically blocking any impression that doesn’t reveal the URL. This means that advertisers never even have the option of bidding on suspect inventory – it simply doesn’t reach them.
This is a crucial component of AudienceScience’s larger transparency initiative. EAMS technology is put directly in the hands of the client, so there is no sorting through the LUMAscape for the right tools. You can picture it like this:
The brand’s in-house ad or brand manager can turn on their PC in the morning and see a clear, real time view of their ad campaign through their Gateway dashboard. They get to choose their inventory sources. So, while other intermediary partners promise premium inventory, Gateway actually allows the brand to pick their supply partners, so the brand knows where those ads will appear and who will see them. That’s total transparency up front, eliminating the potential for fraud, as well as any hidden supplier or arbitrage costs.
You can only imagine how bad things must have been at Mercedes the day they learned more robots than humans were viewing their ads. When logged in to Gateway, the brand manager can see straightaway what’s working and what’s not and can change the campaign instantly to drive better results. There are no unfortunate surprises, no crises to manage, and most importantly, no headaches from trying to navigate the fraud prevention options in the LUMAscape.
