Nobody Learns Anything
- Bob Hoffman
- Apr 8
- 3 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
For over a decade, annoying dickheads like me have been writing, screaming, and holding our breath about how marketers are being screwed blind by the adtech con artists.
It hasn't done an ounce of good.
Recently The Wall Street Journal had a major piece entitled 'Efforts to Weed Out Fake Users for Online Advertisers Fall Short.' The piece is focused on something I've written about a lot - how the reports marketers get about their online campaigns are completely unreliable.
But let's start at the beginning. First let's take a look at the scope of fraud in online advertising. The Journal published this chart, from Juniper Research, which estimates online ad fraud in 2025 at over $100 billion.
You would think losing over $100 billion in one year to fraud would cause some kind of angst in the ad community. Not a bit. We have normalized stupidity and incompetence to such an extent that all you hear are crickets.
Next, the Journal reported on a new study by Adalytics that indicates the following:
"The top three companies that advertisers pay to detect and filter out bots—DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science and Human Security—regularly miss nonhuman traffic."
"The report...found tens of millions of instances over seven years in which ads for brands including Hershey’s, Tyson Foods, T-Mobile, Diageo, the U.S. Postal Service and the Journal were served to bots across thousands of websites."
"This occurred even in cases when bots identified themselves as such" Let me emphasize this. Some bots are harmless, identify themselves as such, and just perform non-detrimental tasks. Even when non-malign bots identified themselves as bots the so-called 'fraud detection' companies couldn't find them. 'It’s like, can you tell the difference between a person and a person-shaped sock puppet that is holding up a sign saying, ‘I am a sock puppet’?' said Laura Edelson, a computer science professor at Northeastern University and former Justice Department technologist."
"DoubleVerify missed 21% of the documented bot visits and allowed ads to be served to them, according to (one) publisher’s analysis...In some cases, DoubleVerify’s software identified a bot but still let a brand buy an ad for that audience, the analysis showed." That's worth emphasizing - they found bots but still treated them as human and the advertiser got charged. How's that for incompetence?
"Fighting fraud by bad actors—which don’t flag themselves as bots—is even harder." If these clowns can't identify a bot that turns itself in and announces it's a bot, how in the f-ing world are you supposed to believe it can find bad bots that are trying to hide?
Here's the bottom line.
-- You have media people buying advertising from the programmatic fraud factory. They have no idea what they're buying, who they are buying from, what they are paying, or what they are getting.
-- Then to justify their incompetence they hire these validation clowns who can't find their ass with two hands and a flashlight, and provide them with horseshit reports that 'certify' their work.
--Then they take their bullshit reports to their bosses and say, "Look how smart I am."
It has been reported that Senator Mark Warner of Virginia is asking the FTC and DOJ to investigate these clowns.
According to the Check My Ads Institute, who have been cooperating with Warner in his scrutiny of online advertising, there is "alarming evidence that adtech companies are misleading government entities and taxpayers, charities, and other businesses about their ability to detect and prevent fraudulent ad placements."
Public entities that have been screwed by the "real time bot detection" horseshit of the so-called fraud detection companies include the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the U.S. Census Bureau (Census), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the United States Postal Service (USPS).
In a letter to the the head of the FTC, Warner wrote, "Research indicates that certain ad verification companies are making apparently false and misleading claims about the capability of their products..."
Gosh, who'd a thunk it?
