It’s no surprise to anyone that digital advertising spend continues to surge. According to a report published by the IAB, digital advertising revenues rose by 16% to $49.5 billion in 2014. Mobile, social, video and programmatic all continued to grow year over year, leading to digital’s overall growth.
Digital has enabled advertisers to reach more consumers with more precision and more ease, all the while providing accurate ways of tracking campaigns. In spite of these advances, it hasn’t entirely been a road paved with gold. With new formats and new opportunities have come new challenges.
Three of the biggest concerns for advertisers are fraudulent traffic, ads appearing out of view and ads appearing within or next to risqué content. These issues are crippling performance and wasting valuable advertising budgets. For instance, 6.3 billion US dollars will be lost to fraudulent traffic this year, while it was found that 56.1% of ad impressions were unseen.
At the heart of this problem are the opaque practices of media agencies and ad-tech providers. Advertisers are handed campaign performance results and charged with a bill, while everything that happens in between remains a black box. The hows and whys of campaign are never answered.
The only way to assuage these practices are by putting more control in the hands of advertisers and providing more transparency about the process, and this only happens with education. Advertisers need to be provided with and strive to have more knowledge about digital advertising, especially complex delivery systems such as programmatic.
As they say, the first step is “admitting you have a problem.” Therefore, the infographic below illustrates these “digital ad crimes,” who the perpetrators are and offers up preventative measures that can be taken to alleviate these austere problems.
