Anyone who is involved with any type of digital or performance marketing knows that click fraud is a big issue. Marketers and advertisers have long been talking about the problems associated with bot traffic and other fraud related issues. For the most part, however, the brands that are actually paying for the advertisements have sat back and lived with the issue.
Keith Weed is the CMO at Unilever, however, and he is starting to change that. Unilever has an estimated annual marketing budget of around $5 Billion, making them one of the largest advertisers in the world. It is no surprise, therefore, that they are not happy with such a large percentage of their digital ad budget being wasted.
He was recently quoted in the Times saying that approximately 29% of all web traffic is non-human in nature. Some of it is legit bots from Google or other search engines, but the majority of it comes from bots that are trying to get ads displayed so site owners and others can make additional revenue from them. These ads, Weed believes, should not be billed to the advertisers since they are not actually ever being seen by the users.
The three major issues he brought up were bots, viewability and ad-blocking software. He went on to say that agencies should be required to develop tools or systems to make sure brands are only being charged when an ad has actually been seen by a real person. This seems like a very reasonable demand, but for years not ad agencies have been unable or unwilling to deliver.
The fact that Unilever is talking about this very publically and making demands of digital ad agencies, however, might really push for real change. If Unilever pulls some or all of their digital advertising money, it will cause major problems for agencies. If other brands follow suit, you can bet there would be real change made very quickly.
How ad agencies will respond to this challenge is going to be an important factor in the near-term future of digital advertising.
