In one of the most ludicrous, incompetent, cover-up capers in history, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) has been guilty of giving their constituents false information about ad fraud for years.
You might ask why the ANA would want to mislead their members? We’ll get to that in a minute, but first let’s have a look at what they’ve been up to.
In May of 2022, the ANA sent out a newsletter written by their Director of Research and Innovation which reported that in 2022 ad fraud was going to cost advertisers $120 billion. Here is a chart reproduced directly from that report.
It shows that in 2022 ad fraud would cost advertisers...
$20 billion from app install farms and SDK spoofing
$35 billion from click spam and ad stacking
$65 billion from click injection
For a total of $120 billion
All of those estimates were exquisitely out of line with previous statements the ANA had made about ad fraud. They were also out of line with another estimate inside the same report that claimed ad fraud would cost advertisers $81 billion that same year.
Their history on this subject is equally ludicrous. In 2019 they said that the, “ ... war on ad fraud is succeeding,” and that ad fraud would amount to $5.8 billion in 2019. Here I've reproduced a press release trumpeting that estimate.
Astoundingly, the 2022 newsletter estimated that fraud in 2019 had actually amounted to $72 billion, not the $5.8 billion reported in the press release above. Here's a chart reproduced from the 2022 newsletter...
Let's return to 2022 for a minute. Put yourself in the shoes of the ANA. Your Director of Research and Innovation has just issued a newsletter to your constituents that contradicted everything you’ve told them about ad fraud. What do you do?
Right! You “disappear” the report. The next day the newsletter evaporated from the web. When you tried to access the newsletter, you got this message:
This notification claimed that the page "could not be found" and that the ANA’s technical staff “had been notified.” It was a lie. The truth is they took down the newsletter because it was an embarrassment and emblematic of the incompetence and duplicity that have characterized the ANA’s cover-up of ad fraud. The report was buried and even today there is nowhere it can be found. Thanks to Krzysztof Franaszek I was able to locate a copy of it and reproduce it. You can find it at the bottom of this page.
It's amazing how this document "could not be found" by the people who published it, but could be found by a dumbass blogweasel.
The ANA is the primary trade group responsible for looking after the interests of the country’s largest advertisers—Coke, Nike, GM, Budweiser, P&G, McDonald’s, and just about every other substantial brand you can think of. But instead of doing their job, they have spent years tap-dancing and double-talking their way around what is costing companies tens of billions of dollars every year. Instead of being honest with their constituents, the ANA is tripping in its underwear pretending ad fraud is under control.
The truth is, no one knows the exact extent of ad fraud. Sadly, there is no International Registry of Fraud where criminals report their stolen gains. But as the representative association of most of the world’s largest advertisers, the ANA needs to get its story straight. They have a responsibility to be honest with their constituents, with the business community, and with the public.
Sometimes it’s hard to comprehend the meaning of large numbers. Here’s some context. If the ANA's Director of Research and Innovation was correct, and ad fraud is stealing $120 billion a year from advertisers, ad fraud is as big a business as Coca-Cola, Nike, and McDonald's combined.
Here is the document that "could not be found" by the ANA.