Episode 61

The Insane Waste Behind Online Advertising

Did you know marketers will spend more than $650 billion on online ads this year? Or that a surprisingly massive chunk of this spending will be completely wasted?

This week, Elena, Angela, and Rob discuss Bob Hoffman’s recent book, Inside the Black Box, which highlights one of the dark sides of online advertising—ad fraud. As marketers, we all know ad fraud is a problem. But it might be even worse than we thought. Shockingly, WFA says that by 2025, ad fraud may be the second largest source of criminal income on the planet.

Topics Covered

• [00:45] Introducing Inside the Black Box

• [02:30] Why programmatic media buying is subject to fraud

• [07:30] What’s wrong with MFA sites

• [12:30] Types of ad fraud

• [16:30] Ad viewability across ad formats

• [19:00] How to prevent and reduce wasted ad spend

Resources:

Inside the Black Box by Bob Hoffman, 2024

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