Skip to main content

Advertising Fraud: Can Artificial Intelligence Reduce It?

When implemented correctly, the potential benefits that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can bring to the digital advertising industry are significant. Enhancing a digital advertising platform's ability to efficiently target the correct audience, while detecting fraudulent publisher activities, would be a huge advantage.

According to the latest worldwide market study by Juniper Research, the use of AI for advertising purposes overlaps with the development of other applications. For instance, as bots and digital assistants are mechanisms for human to machine communications, the opposite may also be true -- where the AI machine, aware of the user's interests, can be used as a tool for brand advertising.

However, the applications of AI in advertising extends beyond this use case.

AI for Advertising Market Development

That said, what's primarily driving the demand for AI apps in advertising? The Juniper Research study found that advertisers will lose an estimated $19 billion to fraudulent activities next year -- that's equivalent to about $51 million per day. This annual revenue loss, representing advertising on online and mobile devices, will continue to rise, reaching $44 billion by 2022.


Juniper claimed that the 'Walled Garden' -- a closed system approach whereby advertising platforms restrict the flow of ad performance data to advertisers and publishers -- must be abandoned to stimulate true transparency between all stakeholders.

The Juniper study findings also found that advertising fraud rates will continue to increase as a result of this dysfunctional activity, further hindering stakeholder efforts in tackling fraud.

Additionally, the research predicted that AI will be crucial in analyzing the vast amounts of data generated from advertising activities daily and minimizing loss due to fraud. Juniper believes that fraudsters will increasingly innovate in their approaches to imitate genuine advertising activity -- including simulated clicks, mouse movements and social network accounts.

"Fraudsters will continue to heavily invest in domains, user accounts and bot farms in order to appear genuine," said Sam Barker, senior analyst at Juniper Research. "Advertising stakeholders will demand constant vigilance against the threat of ad fraud, which will only be achieved through the correct implementation of AI services."

The research also predicted that platforms leveraging AI for targeting purposes will account for 74 percent of total online and mobile advertising spend by 2022.

However, as the adoption of AI solutions become saturated, only platforms demonstrating the most effective algorithms will be able to charge premium prices to advertisers and marketers.

Outlook for Effective Ad Fraud Solutions

According to the study, these platforms will need to focus on machine learning training via new data sources to improve the proficiency of their AI algorithms. Data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices, information sharing partnerships and cross device user identification could become highly sought-after.

Furthermore, the other obvious solution for B2B marketers is to reduce their use of advertising, given the diminished effectiveness of typical ad investments. In contrast, more savvy CMOs are investing in proven digital transformation and content marketing methods that have a significantly better return-on-investment.

Popular posts from this blog

Open Banking Usage to Grow by 470 Percent

The Open Banking business model has been advantageous for Third-Party Providers (TPPs), helping them to extend their offerings into other areas of financial services with new capabilities. Open Banking is also advantageous for traditional banking institutions, despite the perceived loss of custodianship over their data, by providing greater accessibility to more bank services. Furthermore, Open Banking can help serve Mobile Internet providers that are able to leverage it to create tailored services according to customers’ preferences and/or economic limitations. Open Banking Market Development Since traditional banking services are made more convenient by TPPs via greater data access, customers can proactively manage their finances and shape the development of new financial offerings. This is particularly noticeable in the realm of Digital Payments, where retail merchants and customers transact through eCommerce, which has the greatest number of use cases for Open Banking. These includ

Digital Talent Demand Exceeds Supply in Asia-Pac

Even the savviest CEO's desire for a digital transformation advantage has to face the global market reality -- there simply isn't enough skilled and experienced talent available to meet demand. According to the latest market study by IDC, around 60-80 percent of Asia-Pacific (AP) organizations find it "difficult" or "extremely difficult" to fill many IT roles -- including cybersecurity, software development, and data insight professionals. Major consequences of the skills shortage are increased workload on remaining digital business and IT employees, increased security risks, and loss of "hard-to-replace" critical transformation knowledge. Digital Business Talent Market Development Although big tech companies' layoffs are making headlines, they are not representative of the overall global marketplace. Ongoing difficulty to fill key practitioner vacancies is still among the top issues faced by leaders across industries. "Skills are difficul

Mobile Device Market Still Awaiting Recovery

The mobile devices market has experienced three years of unpredictable demand. The global pandemic, geopolitical pressures, supply chain issues, and macroeconomic headwinds have hindered the sector's consistent growth potential. This extremely challenging environment has dramatically affected both demand and supply chains. It has led to subsequent inflationary pressures, leading to a worsening global cost of living crisis suppressing growth and confidence in the sector. In tandem, mobile device industry stakeholders have become more cautious triggering market uncertainties. Mobile Device Market Development Operating under such a backdrop, the development of mobile device ecosystems and vendor landscapes have been impacted severely. Many of these market pressures persisted throughout 2022 and now into 2023, borne chiefly by the smartphone market. According to the latest worldwide market study by ABI Research, worldwide smartphone shipments in 2022 declined 9.6 percent Year-over-Year