Scams sparked by video inventory shortages

Now more than 30% of advertisers and 50% of advertising exchanges complain about the extreme shortage of online video advertising. Inventory refers to the digital real estate on which publishers can place advertising videos on screen for users to view. Advertisers desperately need more inventory (more digital real estate) to run their video ads, but publishers are having a hard time keeping up with this growing demand. In part, that's because publishers are confined to tight spaces on tiny screens filled with cluttered feeds.

The shortage of video ad space has been the catalyst for an overall imbalance in ad fraud as publishers continue to seek to accommodate steady growth in demand. Video ads account for less than 40% of all online advertising, but are responsible for more than 64% of ad fraud25 It is said that advertisers lose more than 16.4 billion a year due to ad fraud, especially if these advertisers have to pay for ads that do not exist at all” or pay the full price for ads that are manipulated by robots or other algorithms. Google believes that only 44 % is artificial viewing. According to the forecast of the World Federation of Advertisers, the amount of global advertising fraud will increase to 50 billion in the next 10 years.

This fraud is done on two main levels by middlemen in the video advertising industry. One is misrepresentation through pre-roll ads, in which distributors mislead advertisers about where, when and how their video ads are posted. The second is to degrade inventory performance by intentionally changing video tags and assigning irrelevant videos through manual tags.

Procter & Gamble’s chief brand officer, Marc Pritchard, sums it up well: “Better advertising and media transparency go hand in hand. Why? Because better advertising takes time and money, and we all waste so much of it on In a media supply chain with low standards, too many players rating their own works, too many invisible black box operations, and too many loopholes for criminals to take advantage of. Our media supply chain, at the best It's chaos and at worst fraud. We need to clean up and spend the time and money we save on better advertising to drive sales."

In short, in the current advertising ecosystem, the central faction holds the core control of complex and opaque economic business, so the advertising ecosystem at this stage is not working for anyone.