A growing number of marketers are taking back control of their digital marketing campaigns as more cases of fraudulent and waste in programmatic spending emerge across the world.

Mr Jay Shah, CEO of artificial intelligence group OpenDNA, said marketers were taking back control of critically important processes like customer targeting, as many digital and programmatic advertising, where online ads are bought using automated systems, were becoming less transparent and open to fraud.

He said, “Global marketers like Unilever, Nestle, The Financial Times and Procter & Gamble have all recently spoken out about the need to address issues within the digital marketing sphere, which range from fraud, automated bots reading ads and a general lack of accountability and ability to measure and audit where their ad spends are going”.

He cited a recent investigation by the Financial Times, which uncovered 300 fraudulent sellers claiming to offer digital ads on the FT’s website across 15 programmatic exchanges, with the equivalent of one month’s inventory of genuine ads in the FT site appearing for sale every day on the fraudulent programmatic ad exchanges.

Shah said, “The original promise of digital marketing was brands would be able to communicate directly with real people at scale through programmatic advertising. But the reality is most marketers only reach some of the people they want to reach some of the time.

“Marketers see the need to communicate with customers as individuals, not the broad categories offered by programmatic exchanges, Google and Facebook, which we are seeing are often way off the mark,” he added.

With spending on digital surpassing TV, many marketers are looking to new sophisticated artificial intelligence technologies like OpenDNA to ensure their increased spend can be audited and verified.

OpenDNA clients seeking greater accuracy with their customer communications include, Endeavour Drinks Group, luxury publisher The Robb Report, global news service and publisher The Epoch Times, as well as a global business data and advertising technology companies Looker. 

“Smart marketers are using our artificial intelligence to make the most of the data generated online by their customers across multiple platforms. The worst thing a marketer can do for their brand is give their customers an inappropriate digital ad experience which can lead to the loss of trust in the brand,” Shah said.