Mumbai: Ad fraud refers to any fraudulent or deceptive activity that aims to manipulate or exploit online advertising systems for financial gain. It involves various techniques designed to deceive advertisers, publishers, or ad networks, ultimately leading to the misallocation of advertising budgets and undermining the integrity of the digital advertising ecosystem.
There are several types of ad fraud, including Click Fraud, Impression Fraud, Conversion Fraud, Domain spoofing and Bot traffic.
Ad fraud poses significant challenges to advertisers, publishers, and the overall digital advertising industry. It can result in financial losses, reduced trust in advertising metrics, and a diminished user experience. To combat ad fraud, industry stakeholders employ various preventive measures, such as fraud detection algorithms, traffic verification tools, ad verification services, and partnerships with trusted advertising networks.
It's important for advertisers and publishers to stay updated on the latest ad fraud trends and employ robust ad fraud prevention strategies to minimize the impact of fraudulent activities and ensure a transparent and effective advertising ecosystem.
Integral Ad Science (IAS) is a global leader in digital media quality. IAS makes every impression count, ensuring that ads are viewable by real people, in safe and suitable environments, activating contextual targeting, and driving supply path optimization. Our mission is to be the global benchmark for trust and transparency in digital media quality for the world's leading brands, publishers, and platforms. We do this through data-driven technologies with actionable real-time signals and insight. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in New York, IAS works with thousands of top advertisers and premium publishers worldwide.
Saurabh is the country manager of India at Integral Ad Science. In his current role, he has built a strong partnership with clients, agencies, and publishers by helping them solve their pressing business challenges with the use of cutting-edge IAS technology solutions. He’s leading IAS’s India expansion efforts as part of a larger global initiative taking place within IAS.
Indiantelevision.com in an email interaction spoke to the Integral Ad Science country manager of India Saurabh Khattar on building strong partnerships with clients, agencies, and publishers by helping them solve their pressing business challenges with the use of cutting-edge IAS technology solutions.
Edited Excerpts:
On Total Media Quality works for video, audio, and text
Total Media Quality (TMQ) was introduced by IAS as the next-generation measurement for advertisers to confidently scale their media buys. On one hand, where industry-standard Metadata Analysis focuses on the title, description and keyword tags, IAS’s Multimedia Technology Analysis takes into account the images, audio, and text on the screen by analysing thousands of signals per video. Our brand safety and suitability solution allows you to maximise media investment, gain peace of mind, and drive efficiencies.
Brand safety & suitability play a vital part in advertisers growing their brand with confidence. With the help of TMQ, ads only run next to GARM-safe and suitable content, scored by IAS through a video-level, three-tiered machine learning system. The IAS Multimedia technology captures over 3,000 visual cues per video (assuming an average 12-minute video length) by combining signals such as image, audio and/or text. Industry-leading advanced machine learning technology and data science expertise ensure precision and accuracy with global protection across over 40 languages.
Advertisers can use TMQ verification across social media platforms, Connected TV (CTV), Audio, and the open web. When it comes to CTV, content consumption has increased tremendously as consumers are spending much time streaming content. As the amount of content continues to grow across streaming platforms, marketers need sophisticated tech to keep pace. Through TMQ, advertisers worldwide will be provided with industry-leading brand safety and suitability measurement across online video platforms.
Since IAS’s updated reporting is aligned with the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) Brand Safety and Suitability framework, this will enable granular campaign reporting for maximum impact and is another step towards building trust and transparency with advertisers.
On the benefits of frame-by-frame analysis for video inventory
Video-level, frame-by-frame analysis powered by a combination of image, audio and/or text signals has proven to be three times more accurate at identifying high-risk content and unlocking new insights for advertisers.
Multimedia recognition and classification takes a holistic view of brand safety by analysing the sports & events classification, celebrity recognition, brands & logos recognition, object detection & tracking, and place identification. It uses image, audio and/or text across thousands of visual cues per video, so brands can rest assured they are running on safe content and avoiding a PR crisis.
Powered by cutting-edge, machine learning technology, it ensures the most accurate brand suitability classification.
Some of the benefits of using frame-by-frame analysis for video inventory are:
Delivers 7x accuracy identifying 'Arms and Ammunition’ content
Delivers 8x improvement identifying high-risk 'Death, Injury & Military Conflict’ content
Delivers 10x accuracy in identifying high-risk 'Obscenity and Profanity’ content
In addition to brand safety & suitability, advertisers can also validate their campaign performance through viewability & invalid traffic measurement. This helps advertisers optimise their campaigns, on-the-go, based on what’s driving engagement with viewability, time-in-view and more.
On providing insights into some of the other innovative solutions or developments that IAS has introduced recently to help advertisers optimise their digital campaigns and boost revenue
Innovation has been the keen theme for IAS. is a key factor for IAS to be recognised as the leader in digital media quality. Recently, this innovation has seen us introduce offerings to emerging mediums such as audio i.e. podcast, gaming, and CTV. We have partnered with the likes of Spotify, and Pandora in music; with leading streaming platforms such as Netflix; Anzu and Gadsme for in-game advertising; with Twitter and LinkedIn in the social media industry.
Below is a quick overview of these partnerships:
Social Media Partnership — Twitter and IAS announced the launch of third-party brand safety and suitability measurement on Twitter in the US. With Tweet-level analysis, advertisers can better understand the content that appears adjacent to their ads on Twitter's feed.
CTV Partnership — Netflix selected IAS as one of their partners to provide transparency into advertising performance on the upcoming Netflix ad-supported plan. IAS will be among the first to measure viewability and IVT post-bid measurement to provide brands and agencies with consistent measurement across media buys to better understand and optimise engagement. IAS's Netflix verification will be available in the first quarter of 2023.
Audio Partnership — IAS partnered with Spotify to establish a third-party brand safety solution for podcast advertisers. The firms intend to create the industry’s first third-party brand safety and suitability reporting tool to bring more transparency and confidence to podcast advertising.
Gaming Partnerships — IAS partnered with Anzu, an in-game advertising leader, to enable global brands and agencies to effectively monitor the quality of their in-game media investments in mobile gaming environments. Through this collaboration, IAS provides advertisers with Invalid Traffic (IVT) measurement and reports on Viewability through the IAS Signal platform.
IAS also entered a first-to-market partnership with Gadsme, a premium in-game advertising platform, which will enable IAS to verify Gadsme ad inventory globally and provide marketers with third-party viewability and invalid traffic measurement (IVT) through the IAS Signal platform.
On some unique challenges and opportunities that Indian advertisers face in this space
CTV consumers and ad spending continue to grow at breakneck speed. To understand just how big CTV is in India, we need not look further than the viewing numbers and advertising prices for the recently concluded IPL tournament.
It is no secret that fraudsters always follow the money, and with the high CPM cost of CTV advertising, one can clearly see CTV ad fraud as a challenge for advertisers in this space. Simultaneously, because the CTV environment is fairly new, it has its own set of unique challenges and opportunities. A popular form of ad fraud on CTV is device spoofing (SIVT) which happens when non-CTV devices represent themselves as CTV devices. Another example is that of an ad running through a secondary device such as a gaming console or DTH/set-top box while the TV is turned off. Then there is the invalid Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) which has emerged as a big risk factor to OTT/CTV advertising”.
As viewership continues to rise, the industry will need to adapt to support and measure holistic, cross-screen advertising strategies.
ON IAS's CTV and video solutions to address these challenges and help advertisers maximise their ROI
Realising how big ad fraud is on CTV, IAS is the first and only partner to work directly with the largest video publishers to validate that video ad are played to completion, free from invalid traffic. Our solution was designed specifically for connected television to protect our clients from invalid traffic but also false positives from unstandardized signals. Our close relationships with publishers allow us transparency into inventory so that we can properly identify signals, known and unknown.
Since the CTV environment is still fairly new to the advertising space, IAS expects higher levels of malicious fraudulent activity across less transparent and long-tail inventory.
Marketers want to know where their CTV ads are being served and if their ads are viewable. They are focused on increasing sales and hitting campaign KPIs, not wasting the budget. However, CTV environments cannot be measured for viewability using conventional tracking methods given the lack of javascript support. To help address this issue, IAS has enhanced our CTV Ad Verification with rendered and viewable impression metrics. By gaining insight into viewability metrics, advertisers will be able to optimise their creatives for CTV consumption. The goal is to extend the granularity and trusted measurement that IAS offers now for Web Video and Mobile App to CTV so that marketers know that their ads are fraud-free, viewable, and are playing on apps that they know and trust.
IAS validates that impressions originate from sources (devices, apps, platforms) that deliver 100 per cent of the ad’s pixels on the screen consistently. As CTV continues to grow, measurement is more important than ever, and IAS ensures your media spend for the present and future of TV.
On IAS plan to staying at the forefront of technology and innovation in the advertising industry
At IAS, our mission is to make the internet a safe place for advertisers, and we help our customers make every ad impression count. Innovation is at the core of our business model and we ensure media budgets do not go to waste. Therefore, continuing to help businesses safeguard their brand reputation and maximise ad investments goes hand-in-hand with staying at the forefront of technology and innovation.
A testament to our commitment is our recent fraud finding, where the IAS Threat Lab collaborated with Google to take down a malicious app called Oko VPN, which was generating approximately 100 million fraudulent impressions per month at the time of its removal from the Google Play Store. The team estimates that $10 million in advertiser spend was wasted on this scheme.
