Ad Validation

Today’s modern landscape opens up tons of possibilities for business owners and marketers, especially those running things completely online. A myriad of tools are available to help even a solo-operated e-commerce business keep up with the big players, and many of the newest toys are powered by AI. Let’s take a closer look at how artificial intelligence is affecting the e-commerce industry and how you can take advantage of it moving forward!

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.

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.

This year has brought countless changes to markets everywhere, including the political arenas. But unlike the downturn of other markets, 2020 political ad spend is expected to increase and break all previous records. In a recent report from Politico, the initial 2020 ad spend estimates of $6 billion were modified by 12% to predict at least $6.7 billion in this year’s political ad spend! With so much being invested during such a pivotal time for the globe, all eyes will be on politicians and their answers to the many challenges we’ve seen this year.