March 26th-April 1st

Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. We have an announcement. From now on, our newsletter will be 100% memes…

APRIL FOOLS! We do love memes though, and will be using them abundantly. This week’s edition starts with yet ANOTHER black eye for the industry, courtesy of who else: Adalytics…

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Top Stories 👁️

Efforts to Weed Out Fake Users for Online Advertisers Fall Short🔒
Source: Wall Street Journal
March 28th, 2025

Summary: The Wall Street Journal has published a report based on Adalytics research claiming that the digital ad industry's top verification companies—DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science (IAS), and Human Security—are failing to catch bots in digital advertising, even when those bots openly identify themselves.

Here's the situation in plain English: When you browse the web, your browser sends information about itself called a "user-agent string" (basically saying "I'm Chrome on Windows" or "I'm Safari on iPhone"). Legitimate bots used for things like website archiving or security scanning typically announce themselves clearly in this string (saying something like "I'm Googlebot" or "I'm a URLScan bot"). According to Adalytics, verification vendors are missing these self-declared bots and allowing advertisers to waste money showing ads to them.

The WSJ report states that at least 40% of web traffic is fake users or bots (according to Cloudflare), and Adalytics found "tens of millions of instances over seven years" where ads from major brands like Hershey's, Tyson Foods, and T-Mobile were served to bots across thousands of websites.

A critical issue highlighted is whether verification vendors have access to necessary data to spot bots before an ad is purchased. The article claims that services from DoubleVerify and IAS that try to catch bots before an advertiser bids on an ad (called "pre-bid filtering") don't receive user-agent information from some major ad-buying platforms—meaning they lack crucial information needed to identify bots in real-time.

DoubleVerify has issued a strong rebuttal, claiming the WSJ article and Adalytics report are "inaccurate and misleading." Their defense:

1. They correctly identified the bot traffic in every example shared before publication
2. When they identify bot traffic, those impressions are removed from billable counts reported to advertisers
3. The WSJ doesn't cite a single example of a "general invalid traffic" (GIVT) impression that DoubleVerify actually failed to detect
4. In cases where pre-bid filtering can't occur, their post-bid systems identify bots and ensure advertisers don't pay for those impressions

This report comes just weeks after Adalytics' February exposé showing ads appearing next to child sexual abuse material (CSAM), which prompted letters from U.S. Senators to the same verification vendors. The recurring theme across both reports: Are verification vendors providing the protection that advertisers are paying for?

Opinion: This verification controversy highlights a fundamental problem in digital advertising: the gap between what's promised and what's delivered. While verification vendors market both pre-bid and post-bid capabilities, the industry has allowed technical complexity to obscure a simpler truth - marketers are often not getting the proactive protection they believe they're paying for.

Yes, there’s plenty of blame to go around. Verification companies bear a lot. But we should recognize this as a symptom of three deeper industry challenges:

1. The transparency deficit: Digital advertising has evolved into a labyrinth of technical systems that few fully understand. This complexity has created a knowledge asymmetry that allows vendors to make claims that buyers can't effectively evaluate.

2. Misaligned incentives: The current ecosystem rewards volume, speed, and antiquated success metrics over quality and accuracy. Ad platforms are incentivized to process as many transactions as possible, even if that means limiting the data available for proper verification.

3. The accountability gap: When problems emerge, the finger-pointing begins. Verification vendors blame DSPs for insufficient data access, DSPs blame SSPs for insufficient data access, DSPs blame verification vendors for technical limitations, and marketers are left wondering who's actually responsible.

The solution isn't just better educated marketers who can ask the right questions (though that helps). We need structural reform:

• Standardized access protocols: Industry bodies should establish minimum requirements for data sharing between platforms and verification services.

• Transparency requirements: There needs to be clear disclosure of exactly which methods (pre-bid vs. post-bid) are being used in which environments, with performance metrics for each.

• Independent testing: Third-party audits that use controlled bot traffic to evaluate the effectiveness of verification systems across the entire ecosystem. (Yup, we need verification for verification.)

The companies that will win in the long run are those that embrace radical transparency about their capabilities and limitations. In a marketplace built on trust, hiding behind technical complexity should be a losing strategy.

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That’s It For This Week 👋

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