Brands should invest in fight against ad fraud – Innocent
By Felicia Nwosu
Uchenna Innocent, Head, Ad Operations at HippoAd, has challenged brands to invest hugely in the fight against ad fraud. This, he noted, will safeguard their investments as well as the identity and privacy of their community members from any potential harm.
Recently, Global Insight Services projection indicated that ad fraud detection tools market is expected to grow rapidly over the next 10 years to more than US$ 9.4 billion.
The digital expert also advised them to broaden their scope in order to get acquainted with all-round knowledge that will enlighten them on the dangers of ad fraud and how to combat its impact effectively.
Commenting in an exclusive interview with MARKETING EDGE, Mr. Innocent pointed out that there is a lack of awareness on the adverse effect of ad fraud across the marketing sector, adding that this discourages brands from investing further budgets to tackle it.
Revealing that the prevalence of ad fraud has been growing exponentially at the detriment of brands, he insisted that the onus lies squarely on brand managers to step up with proactive measures as they have a lot to lose.
“In the case of ad fraud, the brand loses. Many times the agency doesn’t typically have anything to lose in this part of the world, as the brands aren’t entirely aware of how this happens, they are more interested in what the surface level or vanity metrics are like. However, this is a bit different with performance driven ads, these are ads with the intention of driving an action like sign ups, deposit or downloads. Ad fraud is an inflation of clicks and impressions which doesn’t come from actual users with interest. They include; accidental clicks, bots, ad injections, click jacking etc.
On whether ad fraud is a criminal offence, the marketing expert said it could be when there’s a clear fraudulent intent, and not accidental like the case of botnets or invalid activities. According to him, there is no regulatory agency charged with the responsibility of monitoring ad fraud in Nigeria. He also reaffirmed that the rapid growth is accelerate by the lack of ad fraud regulation across the industry and the inherent complexity and volume of digital advertising
“There’s no such agency in Nigeria, however, ad fraud monitoring is both the Job of the agency, brand and platform. Agency because they provide the service of ad buying majorly, brand because they need to be clear they have value for money, and the platforms because that is mostly where it happens and they also need to make sure they deliver quality traffic.
Innocent said ad fraud is not restricted to any specific platform but typically, all ad platforms are exposed to ad fraud.
“Currently, certain platforms have taken measures to fight ad fraud on the platform end, for example Google took steps to fight this and now notes “Invalid Traffic” and recalculates ad spend based on this and readjusts the spend data based on this. Other ways to fight these are 3rd party ad fraud monitoring platforms like’ Protect 360 by Appsflyer, Kochava, click guard etc.
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