Digital Paid Media Is A Fraud

A few weeks ago we reported that Apple added blocking ability to all devices before its creator pulled it out of a sense of guilt for removing income from the publishers.

are generated.
Again from Bloomberg:

Increasingly, digital ad viewers aren’t human. A study done last year in conjunction with the Association of National Advertisers embedded billions of digital ads with code designed to determine who or what was seeing them. Eleven percent of display ads and almost a quarter of video ads were “viewed” by software, not people.

And stranger still this phenomenon is being completely ignored by advertising agencies and their brand partners-- if they even know it's happening. Or worse-- it's being endorsed.
At my previous agency we had a digital paid media guru whose job it was to place all those shitty banner ads. I asked for an exhaustive list to see where they were being placed and he looked at me like I asked to make out with his mother. Perhaps he didn't want me to know that one of our clients was serving up ads on piracy sites along with Amex. In this case, I have a strong suspicion our client had no idea that there were two DPM lists: the ones they were allowed to see, and the ones they didn't know existed, but whose views were still counted in case studies.
On the flip side, however, are the clients who absolutely know how the sausage is made and don't care. Now you might ask, why on earth would they want to waste so much money in placing ads that are seen by bots, and have a very little true ROI? I know I asked myself that question. And then the answer occurred to me during a client meeting. I was told I had to put two call to actions on a robust branded experience contained within a music streaming app. I pushed back. Human behavior would suggest if you are listening to a playlist on your mobile device you are most likely not staring at the screen. More importantly, why would you create a robust branded experience for someone only to give them the option to leave the experience through a CTA and not return? When the client insisted, stating how well the CTA performs, I realized it was their job to ensure this bullshit circle of life keeps spinning. There's also another reason