#Ad Validation

Wherever services can be exchanged for money, you’ll find not-so-great artists trying to make as much money with as little effort as possible. Made-for-advertising sites are a barely-legal scam that everyone recognizes when they see it, but it’s still going to eat up around $20 billion dollars in ad spend this year. How does this happen, and – more importantly – how can you minimize its impact on your business?

DoubleVerify recently created an ad verification solution that can verify an ad’s viewability for connected TV. They launched this ad verification in February 2023, allowing advertisers to determine if an ad within a CTV app was actually seen by a user. This marks the first time a viewability measurement solution for CTV has hit the market. On top of our numerous other verification metrics, Genius Monkey employs DoubleVerify for all our video and CTV/OTT campaigns to ensure inventory quality and provide fraud avoidance.

Spam calls: perhaps one of the few universal experiences that can finally unite humanity with our shared annoyance. Whether it takes the form of an email, a text, or a good ol’ fashioned phone call, solicitous communication from companies is something we’ve come to expect in 21st-century America – but that might be about to change. The Future of Spam-Based Text Marketing Recently, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released their Report and Order on fraudulent text messages, requiring providers to block text messages that are “highly likely to be illegal”.

On November 10 in 2021, Russian cybercriminal Aleksandr Zhukov was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his digital ad scam, stealing more than $7 million from U.S. advertisers and publishers for more than 2 years. How did he do it? Russian “King of Ad Fraud” Gets Caught In 2014, Zhukov started an advertising network and received payments from other ad networks to place advertisements on websites. But instead of putting ads on real web pages, he rented 2,000 computer servers and put them in data centers, programming them to act like humans viewing ads.

The most important factor when working to improve your return on ad spend is relevance. Brand relevance must be prioritized to succeed in any marketplace, but it’s even more crucial to maintain your pertinence in a market currently experiencing significant swings due to unforeseen events, such as ours. So how can advertisers stay relevant in today’s world? And who determines what is (or is not) relevant anyway? Both questions have the same answer: the consumer.

It’s a new year with a whole new–and bright–outlook on fraud prevention in the programmatic landscape. The pandemic of 2020 dramatically accelerated digital business efforts, and while some have speculated this could potentially make the digital supply chain more vulnerable to fraud, new research has shown that a good portion of fraud is already being effectively prevented. The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) is a global program composed of several digital supply chain contributors and ad tech companies–including Genius Monkey–that have banded together in a combined effort to fight fraudulent activity and promote brand safety within digital advertising.

Over the top TV (OTT) or Connected TV (CTV) have pretty much made their mark on the advertising landscape — enough to stake their claim as a mainstay in the advertiser’s official bag of tricks! Currently, there are more than 130 CTV applications1 available to viewers, and that number is growing rapidly; like a new city popping up in the middle of the desert. But, with any new city comes new bad guys.

The year of 2020 has been a wild ride and it’s still going strong. This year has thrown marketers from every industry for a loop when it comes to customer patterns and advertising predictability, and while much of what we’ve learned this year has come at a high cost, we’ve learned a plethora of lessons involving consumer behavior, trends and overall ad effectiveness–and savvy marketers are continuing to adapt their campaign strategies accordingly.