Complete Story
10/26/2017
The advertising industry has been living a digital lie
Did you catch that bombshell story posted by BuzzFeed the other day about the super sophisticated online advertising fraud operation?
I noticed right away that it was remarkably similar to a piece I'd written for Adweek in 2013.
It's not that BuzzFeed plagiarized anything. In fact, their reporting was terrific. It's just that the scam allegedly pulled off in this case – creating a bunch of fake websites, selling lots of ads on them via programmatic channels, and then using bots to simulate human visitors – was almost identical to the one I described in my 2013 story.
Which begs the question – why is this still happening? Aren't big marketers screaming about the need for transparency, and shining a light on the murky ad tech supply chain?
Hasn't Procter and Gamble chief digital office Marc Pritchard been on a crusade, exhorting advertisers to take better control over where their digital ads are running? Considering that some P&G ads were found to be running on fake sites in BuzzFeed's story, it seems like nothing much has changed.
For some reason, advertisers can't quit the long tail.
Let me explain.
