The litany of problems that surround digital advertising should be quite familiar to anyone in the media industry at this point. There’s bot traffic creating fake views. Ads disappear “below the fold.” New problems crop up almost daily: Google’s YouTube platform recently got caught up in a scam where hackers were able to take over users’ computers to hijack their CPUs for cryptomining, crashing the computers in the process.
While TV is safe for now, the spread of television to multiple digital platforms means that might not always be the case. Hackers are nothing if not persistent, especially if there is money to be made. While digital TV platforms are currently not targets, that could change quickly. Digital viewing numbers are way up: globally, OTT viewing takes place on more than 2.4 billion devices, and connected TV (CTV) viewing, via smart TVs, is at 168.1 million in the U.S. alone. That’s a lot of potential points of attack.
Digital TV’s attractiveness has a lot of people concerned, among them Frank Sinton, president and founder of Beachfront Media. “It’s such a huge market and it’s growing at such a fast pace,” notes Sinton. “That makes it particularly attractive to hackers.”
To that point, Beachfront, which is one of the leading SSP (supply-side platforms) for OTT and CTV, recently announced a partnership with White Ops, a digital security firm. Their mission is to figure out how to stop fraud and hacking before it even becomes an issue.
“Our strategy with fraud is to remove the financial incentive,” says Michael Tiffany, founder and CEO of White Ops. “If they can’t make any money out of it, then they’re not going to do it.”
Sinton doesn’t feel that he’s overreacting to the situation even though no evidence of fraud exists yet. “As OTT viewing and connected TV viewing continue to grow at such a rapid pace, it’s like we’re waving a red flag at a bull. These guys have made so much money ripping off digital advertising platforms that TV has got to be where they’re putting all their R&D. It’s also never easy to put the genie back in the bottle. Let’s say they succeed, even just temporarily. They now have a taste of the riches they can earn and they’re going to be even more determined. If we can stop them before they get started, they may just give up and go elsewhere.”
So how does White Ops plan to protect television? While Tiffany could not give out precise details (for obvious reasons), he did talk about how digital fraud has created what he calls a “dilution in the value of human attention” by making it seem there was much more opportunity for advertising than there really was. “What advertisers really want is human attention,” he notes, “and there’s only so much of that to go around. What we see are what looks like infinite seas of advertising because of all the bot armies that have been created.” The result is a distorted market with ad loads based on fraudulent viewer numbers. Hence the low CPMs and even lower effectiveness of many of digital ads.
Tiffany explains that White Ops’ MO is to decrease the profitability of ad fraud by making it harder for fraudulent inventory to get access to bids. That makes it more expensive for the botnet operators to perpetrate fraud, as much of their effort will be wasted. It also increases the risk that they’ll lose money on the whole operation. The result, says Tiffany, is that they’ll soon look for greener pastures and leave the TV industry alone.
“We want to keep TV as pristine as possible, and make sure we have all our defenses in place,” adds Sinton. “We don’t want to see the market constantly under suspicion, the way it is with digital.”
One important factor in this discussion is what exactly is “television.” It seems like a simple question, but take a look at enough “state of TV” studies put out by major research groups, and you’ll quickly find that everyone has their own definitions.
For many researchers, anything that doesn’t come into the home via an antenna or set-top box is “digital” even if it’s live linear TV. Thus Sling, and DirecTV Now and Hulu and Netflix are all lumped in the same box with web videos, no matter how short or amateurish the latter may be.
Those of us in the trenches find that sort of categorization to be extremely frustrating, right up there with calling the switch to a virtual MVPD “cord cutting.” (If I’m paying AT&T a monthly fee for the ability to watch live broadcast and cable TV, all I’m doing is shifting the means of delivery. When I stop paying to watch linear TV altogether—that is cord cutting.) There’s a huge difference between watching a YouTube cat video on your iPad and watching This Is Us in real time on NBC, via Hulu Live TV.
Sinton feels our pain.
“Part of what we are trying to accomplish here is to get people to realize that TV on the iPad is still TV. And if it has the same protections and safety that you get with TV, then that makes convincing them that much easier.”
Let’s hope the botnet operators start to feel the same way.
