The second similarity between subprime mortgages and Hwang digital ads highlights the prevalence of waste, fraud, and abuse – by platforms, intermediaries, Banner Design and other third parties (including ad agencies). Examples cited include click fraud, charges for non-viewable impressions, obscene markups (greater than 50%) by agencies; ads purchased in bulk by agencies via negotiated fees, then resold to clients at an exorbitant markup and more. To those unfamiliar with the world of advertising, these things sound awful, with eerie parallels to “The Big Short” coming to mind. But while each of these is (in my opinion) suboptimal business practice, none of this is new. Banner Design Click fraud is the problem of the day – and Hwang is right that it's a serious problem that needs to be addressed if our industry is to move forward. At the time of writing, there are few acceptable global standards for identifying and solving click fraud (and even when new regulations or protocols are put in place, bad actors like click farms seem to discover new ways to circumvent them).
Advertising Continue reading below Banner Design Platforms including Google and Facebook have made efforts to address the issue on their end, including reimbursing advertisers for fraudulent clicks – but these have tended to fall short, particularly for smaller advertisers. Click verification technology has improved significantly over the past few years. However, too few agencies Banner Design offer it by default and too few brands know how to demand it. There is no doubt that click fraud / digital ad fraud is a problem, but not as big as Hwang might think. According to eMarketer, the impacts of click fraud are estimated at around $6.5 billion to around $19 billion, or around 2% to around 6% of the global digital advertising ecosystem. What about unseen impressions? Well, it's also a new Banner Design version of an old problem. Consider that TV ads are bought and sold on a CPM, using audience estimation (i.e. Nielsen ratings).
These rankings use calculated panel data to estimate the number of people watching a given show at a given time. But that's all they are. Estimates. Extrapolated from data samples taken at a given time. Advertising Continue reading below Even if we grant the Banner Design general accuracy of the estimate, how many of us still sit on the couch during commercial breaks, staring at the screen? Isn't this a situation comparable to advertisements paid for but never seen? Similarly, newspapers price ads per readership, but these too are estimates - and even if your customer opens the newspaper containing your ad, how likely is the individual to actually look at page A8 and read your specific Banner Design ad? ? The same goes for billboards and radio ads, airport takeovers and stadium sponsorships and everything in between. Simply put: Unseen impressions are a fact of life in any form of advertising. The only difference is that digital ads have the potential to be better