Advertisers around the world can expect to lose $42 billion of ad spend this year to fraudulent activities, up from $35 billion in 2018.
Digital market specialists Juniper Research, who conducted the research, attribute the growth in fraud to the increasingly sophisticated techniques now being implemented by fraudsters.
The Future Digital Advertising: Artificial Intelligence & Advertising Fraud 2019-2023 report also tips this billion-dollar figure to keep climbing, as techniques like spoofing advertising networks to falsify ad clicks and displayed ads become more and more common.
The total loss to fraud is predicted to reach $100 billion by 2023, according to the report.
And it seems not enough is being done to counter this costly threat.
Juniper forecasts that advertisers will only save $16 billion of their potential lost ad spend to fraud by 2023, due to a lack of adoption of anti-fraud solutions from smaller players.
With digital/Over-the-Top (OTT) TV services rapidly growing in their popularity, they are also expected to be a hotbed of fraudulent activities.
Research author Sam Barker said: “OTT TV service providers must address the issue of advertising fraud if they wish to attract high-value advertisers to their platforms.
“These players must prove the value of advertising on their services by minimising exposure to ad fraud through the adoption of fraud detection and mitigation solutions specific to OTT TV solutions”.
Amazon is coming
The report also outlines a five-year roadmap for AI in advertising, in which Amazon is touted as the company that will “disrupt the established duopoly of Google and Facebook” when it comes to AI advertising platforms.
“The company will leverage its unrivalled dataset of anonymised consumer actions to provide enhanced user targeting,” says the report.
“In turn, advertisers will churn from Google and Facebook’s ad platform.”
Juniper believes Amazon’s market disruption will begin this year.
