The following is a guest piece by Sean Cunningham, CEO and president of the Video Advertising Bureau. Opinions are the writer’s own.
For just a number of minutes, let’s put aside today’s ad market questions on the Adalytics revelations of a Google/YouTube ad fraud scandal. Let’s look past the questions of, “Did they really burn 1,100 major advertisers over three years with useless non-ads in really bad places, and counted all of it as premium inventory?” and allow ourselves to ask the much greater query — why would any ad seller try this?
I feel the answer to “why” lies in an indictment of the ad industry’s all-too-willing non-oversight of Google and YouTube. If Google gamed the ad marketplace and burned advertisers so blatantly, they did so for the most evident of reasons: Because they might.
Google “could” due to compromised transparency standards that caved to walled gardens, they “could” because an all-consuming buy-side ambition to seek out cheaper scale as a perpetual must-do for passing grades and retaining accounts. They “could” due to the undebatable truth in “overseeing” walled gardens like Google — you get to see what they allow you to see.
Caving to the walled gardens on (non) transparency has resulted in Google having the ability to flash “just-like-TV” merit badges of auditor’s accreditation, also badges starting with the words verified, certified, secure and trusted. All the badge-givers compromised by accepting they might never get behind the Google partitions (I’m sure they did ask nicely), and failed in getting any level of knowledge transparency comparable to the standards of third-party TV data; settling as an alternative on whatever first-party data Google allow them to see. The badges then helped game “easy” decisions, who on the buy-side had the time or inclination to inquire behind the familiar badges that would help permission the “buying of as much Google/YouTube as you want or dare… it’s all super legit (and super efficient!).”
Assuming the Adalytics report on Google ad fraud is accurate, the real costly gaming was done directly on the buy/sell market math itself.
In the wake of the extent and duration of the fraud revelations, some vivid young person armed with that Adalytics data is without delay quantifying the artificial pricing pressure Google was capable of exert on other sellers by the use of phantom scale and empty impressions, all of which were counted as pricing “wins” by the buy-side. Given the estimate of $13 billion lost to advertisers due to ads in violation of Google’s own standards, nobody on the buy-side got more burned than the advertisers and their brands, thus the damage was cumulative and exponential.
So, is the last we are going to see of massive ad fraud by the walled gardens? How could you already know?
So long as the industry keeps all the transparency compromises and double-standards in place between multi-screen TV and the walled gardens like Google, we are going to at all times should ask ourselves the same query: what could the next great advertiser-burning/market-gaming ad fraud scandal appear like?
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