The money quietly leaking out of your media budget

Marc ran marketing at Sun International; today, from Los Angeles, he works on digital ad fraud with forensic analysts. His message to South African marketers is uncomfortable and liberating in equal measure. A slice of your media budget is buying nothing, and you can find out which slice.

"There are more online ads bought and paid for daily than there are human beings on earth who could ever consume them."

His definition is precise. Ad fraud is the conscious use of technology to deliver impressions or conversions for profit without giving the advertiser what they paid for: bot networks generating fake traffic, click farms, fake app installs, ads "viewed" on alarm-clock apps by sleeping owners. Not everything is criminal. Half the internet's traffic is bots, some benign, and a Wi-Fi dropout isn't fraud. His refrain is that nothing is black and white, because "the rubbish happens in the grey areas," which is exactly why forensic detail matters.

His own confession makes it real. At Sun International he watched 70% bounce rates get explained away as creative and UX problems, and spent accordingly. "If I knew then what I know now — it was bots. We'd have put that million somewhere else."

What to actually do

Measure on your own ground. The walled gardens don't allow independent verification inside their platforms, so traffic quality is measured where you can see it, on your landing page. "Your vendor isn't telling you what's happening on Meta; they're telling you what Meta told them is happening on Meta."

Distinguish good publishers from bad. Good ones, shown rubbish traffic, want to fix it, which makes traffic-quality evidence a negotiating tool rather than just an alarm. Marc's worked example: a trusted publication delivering 80% quality and 20% junk doesn't get fired. It gets shown the data and asked to renegotiate the rate.

Build exclusion lists and interrogate programmatic placements. "You never want to be on an alarm-clock app."

Question heroic numbers. A bounce rate, click-through or completion rate that defies sense probably isn't human. Ask before you optimise toward it.

The bigger frame

Marc insists on holding one larger point. The industry over-rotated toward performance metrics partly because digital numbers felt certain. "Data is so important, but it has a place. The best brands in the world were not built only on hard-data decisions." The fraud conversation and the brand conversation are the same conversation, and both come down to knowing what your money actually buys.

He's not anti-digital, and he spends heavily on it. He's anti-waste. In a market where every rand is scrutinised, buying back the wasted portion of your media spend might be the highest-return afternoon you spend all quarter.

Try this week: pull your worst bounce-rate source and ask the bot question before the creative question. Start an exclusion list, alarm-clock apps first. And search "what don't I know about online advertising fraud", because as Marc says, the information is out there and the job is to find out what your picture looks like.

Sourced from recorded, on-the-record interviews on the South African Digital Marketing Podcast. Every practitioner quoted above is named in the text.

First published on the SA Marketers' Circle.