Google, AOL, and Omnicom back new initiative to fight digital ad fraud

Some of the biggest ad agencies and ad networks are putting their weight behind a new program that will hopefully verify legitimate digital ad impressions and make sure advertisers are fairly paid.

New York-based Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) is offering a two-pronged strategy.

In the first part, called TAG Registry, legitimate publishers and advertisers will pay $10,000 a year to have their ads marked (or “tagged”) as legitimate and not the work of fraudsters. The registry will provide these players an identifier that they can attach to “every ad they buy, process, place or run,” TAG said.

The second part of the program concerns payments for ads. “TAG is currently developing a Payment ID system in cooperation with leading companies in the programmatic space,” the group said in a statement today. “The goal of the Payment ID system is to create a record of who gets paid for every impression to prevent criminals from receiving ad spend.”

The TAG Registry is available today, but the payments piece is still in development.

There’s no telling if the plan will actually work — bad people get awfully clever when some much money is on the line — but some very large players in the ad space have already pledged their support. These include the programmatic ad companies AOL, AppNexus, Index Exchange, Google, and Rubicon Project, as well as the five biggest global advertising holding companies: Dentsu Aegis Network, Interpublic, Omnicom, Publicis, and WPP. Those companies have all pledged to promote the TAG initiative to their trading partners, too.

Click fraud is a huge problem in the advertising world. A study in December found that as many as a fourth of all video ads and 11 percent of display ads were actually viewed by bots, not real people. Brands, and the advertising firms that represent them, are now routinely demanding that ad networks prove that the ad views they report are human ad views.

Yahoo introduced a new program in June that allows advertisers on its network to independently verify whether their reported clicks and views are real.

Click fraudsters often infect computers with code that instructs them to view videos and click on display ads as a way of artificially amping up impression numbers. They also place bogus ads in ad networks and get paid for fraudulent impressions they create on the other side with the ad-viewing bots.

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) said in December that advertisers are losing $6.3 billion a year because of click fraud.

“The TAG Registry and upcoming Payment ID system will act like a ‘two-factor authentication’ for the digital ad supply chain,” said TAG CEO Mike Zaneis in a statement.

“Through the TAG Registry, buyers will be able to ensure that they are working with trusted parties at every step of their campaigns, while the Payment ID system will ensure that payments only go to legitimate players, choking off the cash to criminals,” Zaneis said.

Hat tip: Adweek