The collaboration aims to provide Chinese companies with the tools to combat ad fraud in digital advertising, while providing recognition to these companies for their work via TAG’s Certified Against Fraud certification.

The anti-fraud standard has been localised to include compliance with China National Standards GBT34092.2 – 2017 – Interactive Advertising – Delivery Monitor Requirements (China National IVT Standard). TAG and CAA are also working toward including sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) in the standard by 2022.

“TAG’s work with CAA in bringing these standards to China adjusts measures to local conditions whilst – at the same time – leveraging an approach that is consistent for businesses operating both in China and beyond,” said Mike Zaneis, President & CEO of TAG.

On top of the Certified Against Fraud certification, companies will be able to achieve TAG’s Brand Safety certification and work together with others to tackle threats to digital advertising via TAG’s Threat Sharing Exchange.

The latest TAG and CAA partnership builds on last year’s – when the duo linked up to fight criminal activity and promote transparency in digital advertising. As a result, the CAA began promoting TAG’s international self-regulatory standards to its member companies.

“Building on our collaboration with TAG, CAA is delighted to launch these standards in China to help tackle criminal activity and promote brand safety in digital advertising,” said Zhang Guo Hua, Chairman of the CAA. “We believe this is an important development and – underpinned with independent validation – will make a real difference to the quality of digital advertising in China. CAA encourages its member companies to take this step.”

The post TAG links up with CAA to clean up Chinese digital advertising appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

The Android version of the app, which has more than 100m downloads, has allegedly been attempting to initiate subscription charges while serving hidden ads to users in order to generate fake clicks, Upstream’s Secure-D has discovered. Successful attempts would have seen the advertiser pay commission to an affiliate, who would have then paid the bad actor responsible for the fraud. Secure-D’s block of the transactions may have saved users over $27m.

“As video sharing becomes increasingly popular in apps like TikTok and Instagram, more users are looking for ways to edit their content. However, bad actors are also scaling up their activity and technology, and they are wreaking havoc in apps like VivaVideo,” said Geoffrey Cleaves, Head of Secure-D at Upstream.

More than 1m devices have been infected across 19 countries, including the UK, Indonesia, Egypt, Thailand, and Russia. The worst hit country is Brazil, where over 11.5m fraudulent transactions were attempted that could have unknowingly cost Brazilians $10.3m in subscriptions they did not intend to purchase.

Upstream also found that the app contains code which checks for monitoring software on a device. When this software is installed, the app was found to stop running all suspicious background activity to cover up its apparent fraudulent behaviour.

Older versions of the VivaVideo app are known to contain an SDK which is banned by Google from Batmobi. Despite the ban, the SDK can still be shared between users with older versions of Android on their handsets.

As such, the advice from Upstream is to update to the latest version of the VivaVideo app.

The post Video editing app VivaVideo allegedly made over 20m fraudulent transaction attempts appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

The pair have committed to working with certified digital advertising suppliers where possible and will encourage suppliers that aren’t certified to sign up to begin their journey toward certification, while educating their internal teams about the initiative.

“We’re delighted to be among the first advertisers to support IAB UK’s Gold Standard. It’s in all of our best interests to collectively raise online ad standards, as we strive to communicate to our customers in the most helpful, relevant and effective way,” said Nick Ashley, head of media and campaign planning at Tesco. “The IAB Gold Standard is a clear start to building better standards across the industry; moving forward we also encourage all stakeholders to agree a single industry-wide set of standards that we can all get behind.”

The Gold Standard was unveiled in 2017 before beginning at the start of 2018. The initiative aims to clean up the digital advertising ecosystem by bringing together programmes for tackling ad fraud, increasing brand safety, and increasing transparency.

As per the stricter criteria introduced by the IAB UK earlier this year, companies need to implement IAB Tech Labs’ ads.txt, become certified under the JICWEBS Digital Trading Standards Group (DTSG), and follow the principles set out by the Coalition for Better Ads in order to achieve a Gold Standard certificate.

“Since its inception, Gold Standard adoption has been really strong. The fact that advertisers are now getting behind the initiative is crucial in cementing its effectiveness,” said Tim Elkington, chief digital officer at IAB UK. “Tesco and McDonald’s are leading by example when it comes to advertisers’ responsibility to improve digital advertising. It’s only by having all parts of the industry on board that we can affect real change.”

The post McDonalds and Tesco commit to cleaning up digital advertising with IAB UK appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Pixalate will work with Criteo across its current suite of products and emerging channels addressing both general invalid traffic (GIVT) and sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT). Pixalate’s Media Rating Terminal (MRT) tool will also be added to Criteo’s protective measures and services.

“Criteo’s partnership with Pixalate is another important step in our ongoing commitment to delivering the best quality inventory for our partners,” said Marc Grabowski, EVP of global supply at Criteo. “Invalid traffic is an ongoing industry issue, and the fight against it cannot be fought alone. By aligning ourselves with a best in class third-party vendor, we’re able to establish additional layers of credible protection alongside our strong existing tools and protocols, in both pre-bid and post-bid environments.”

Jalal Nasir, Pixalate CEO, added: “We are thrilled to announce our partnership with Criteo, a leading multi-national public company. By implementing our end-to-end anti-fraud solution, from media planning to pre-bid fraud protection, Criteo is demonstrating its commitment to the fight against ad fraud.”

Earlier this year, Pixalate formed a similar partnership with mobile advertising firm AdColony to tackle digital ad fraud within mobile app environments. Elsewhere, Criteo has been having some issues with Facebook, filing a complaint against the social network in France for unfairly favouring its own services.

The post Criteo partners with Pixalate on ad fraud appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Captiv8: Verified Reporting
With around 11 per cent of engagement on sponsored influencer Instagram content coming from fraud/bot accounts, Captiv8 wanted to develop reporting tools that detect fraudulent behaviour and provide transparency around campaigns.

It developed Verified Reporting, a machine learning-powered solution that guarantees content is viewed and interacted with by real people. The solution views follower counts to analyse any suspicious changes in follower activity and engagement quality.

Verified Reporting also verifies traffic sources by platform to identify fraud. It does this by identifying changes in geographic distribution of engagement of audience on a per post basis and compares this to posts using regression analysis, identifying odd patterns or fraud indicator behaviours.

Captiv8 provides the solution for every creator. Earlier this year, it teamed up with Horizon Media, becoming the ‘first’ company to provide independent measurement and reporting for agency influencer marketing campaigns.

FraudScore: FraudScore.Action
FraudScore is an independent anti-fraud solution for both mobile and web traffic. Its solution is being used by Zorka.Mobi, a creative mobile performance agency, to check the traffic that it gets for its partners’ apps.

Zorka.Mobi had to find a strong ad fraud detection solution for Russia, with the region being known as one of the most fraud prone traffic sources around the world. It had already faced difficulties from affiliates mixing a share of fraudulent traffic but was unable to provide detailed reporting on the issue, as most fraud detection solutions only provide an evaluation of fraudulent behaviour and don’t drill down into the data. This is where FraudScore stepped in.

FraudScore.Action is used by Zorka.Mobi for CPA campaigns post-analysis for in-app ads. The product is developed for CPI (cost per impression), CPA (cost per acquisition), CPL (cost per lead) traffic analysis and is used by advertising, CPA networks, and advertising agencies.

From September 2018 to December 2018, FraudScore reduced high index fraud from 26 per cent to 2.3 per cent. Zorka.Mobi used reports from FraudScore.Action to track traffic daily and warn affiliates about the need to stop using fraudulent sources.

Impact: Forensiq
Forensiq is a full-funnel ad protection suite aimed at helping clients to gain trust and transparency along the mobile and desktop media buying chain. Acquired by Impact in 2016, it has received Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) and Media Ratings Council (MRC) accreditations in the last couple of years.

Forensiq’s solution does not rely on SDK integration and is built to detect in-app specific fraud tactics. It also combines big data analysis with browser-level insights and server-side filtration, providing full funnel fraud detection with the help of AI and machine learning algorithms.

It uses three essential types of detection in the form of browser and device analysis, behavioural and network analysis, and data mining, AI, and machine learning techniques. Within its platform, Forensiq has a traffic quality dashboard, an ad viewability dashboard, attribution risk dashboards, mobile attribution risk protection, and its reason codes.

One of Forensiq’s clients, StackAdapt, demonstrated a 91 per cent fraud risk improvement over TAG’s 2018 benchmarks and a 41 per cent risk improvement over TAG’s 2018 Certified Channel benchmarks.

Lemmonet wanted to deliver 100 per cent fraud-free traffic to their global performance clients. With Forensiq, they score 200m clicks per month, and have seen an 86 per cent reduction in click fraud and an 87 per cent reduction in install fraud.

Integral Ad Science: pre-bid optimisation
In a bid to make a stand against the $8.2bn lost to ad fraud each year in the US alone, according to IAB figures, Integral Ad Science (IAS) developed tools and established a dedicated FraudLab to make sure ads are served by real publishers, show to real people, and are reach the right target audiences.

It was this kind of solution that one of IAS’s customers was looking for. The FMCG giant with brands across food and petcare wanted to increase the value of its campaigns but was being affected by buying impressions that reach non-human audiences. The FMCG brand was seeing 9.1 per cent of programmatic display and 9.8 per cent of programmatic video impressions succumbing to illegal bot traffic and other forms of fraud.

IAS offered a solution to the brand through its pre-bid ad fraud protection, which eliminates fraudulent inventory before it can be bid on. It worked with the brand, as well as programmatic buyers, to create risk thresholds that achieved the quality and quantity of ad space required by the brand. IAS worked with DSP platforms to provide protection from both GIVT and SIVT fraud.

The pre-bid optimisation led to an 87.7 per cent decrease in fraud levels. This meant the FMCG brand was able to maintain a fraud level of around 1.3 per cent through continuous monitoring and fraud prevention, avoiding over 32.2m fraudulent impressions.

Machine
Machine is the ‘only’ mobile-specific full-stack solution, analysing data at pre-bid, impression, click, install, and post-install level. It boasts clients including Paddy Power, GrubHub, Rakuten, and Trainline, to name a few.

Since winning this category at last year’s awards, the company has grown 120 per cent, going from analysing over 4m app installs a month to analysing more than 10m app installs every month.

Machine analysed over 71.2m app installs from 115 networks in the first half of 2019. It detected that 51 per cent of these app installs were fraudulent. This meant it removed approximately $182m worth of fraudulent app installs. Of the 36.7m fraudulent installs, 63 per cent were farmed installs, 33 per cent was attribution fraud, and four per cent was incent fraud.

Scalarr
Machine learning-powered mobile ad fraud detection solution Scalarr was started in 2016 with the idea to develop an ‘efficient and highly’ accurate tool to detect all mobile app install ad fraud. It set out to do this because it found that existing anti-fraud solutions were only able to see ‘primitive’ fraud and unable to detect new patterns and modifications.

The Scalarr team is made up specialists in data science, machine learning, and mobile advertising. These specialists work to ensure that customers do not waste marketing budget on fraudulent non-human traffic and get ‘real’ LTV (lifetime value) and ROI (return on investment) metrics.

The company first introduced machine learning to its fraud detection in June 2017 and by September 2017 it had been joined by its first clients including Aviasales, Pixonic, and Goodgame Studios. A year later, it introduced a neural network model to uncover smart types of fraud.

In 2018, it investigated 170m installs and analysed 22bn events, uncovering 35.7m fraudulent installs. In this time, it also found 18 new fraud patterns.

Smaato: In-app fraud protection solution
Smaato’s programmatic exchange is designed to safeguard mobile investments from all external threats, including malware, click fraud, bots, and more. It uses a combination of the latest technology and dedicated experts to provide advertisers with access to ‘high-quality’ traffic and ‘authentic’ audiences for their campaigns, while working to keep publishers safe from inappropriate ads.

Its in-app fraud protection solution use a three-pronged approach: in-house technology, expert staff, and trusted third-party fraud protection vendors. It manages almost a trillion ad requests every month and uses machine learning to automatically detect suspicious behaviour.

Protected Media recently made use of Smaato’s solution to analyse 40bn impressions across 10 mobile DSPs and exchanges. It found that in-app fraud attempts occurred 40 per cent less often on the Smaato platform, compared to other DSPs and exchanges.

Smaato was also recently awarded the Certified Against Fraud seal from TAG.

TrafficGuard: Ad fraud prevention
Providing real-time ad fraud prevention for brands, apps, ad networks, and agencies, TrafficGuard aims to mitigate ad fraud to address all its associated costs. Its solution looks to make sure ad fraud never gets paid for by taking a proactive approach that helps everyone in the supply chain.

TrafficGuard sits within the advertising journey, analysing impressions, clicks, installs, and other conversion events as they occur. This means it can invalidate traffic at multiple stages in the journey, whether that’s before the attribution or at the click.

It looks to use a surgical approach to reduce false positives by only removing instances of invalid traffic, leading to improved valid traffic volumes for advertisers and overall better performance. It also shares IVT diagnosis with advertisers and supply partners to ensure transparency. And it’s been built to work alongside any mobile measurement platform (MMP) or with no MMP at all.

Since launching TrafficGuard SaaS in 2018, over 2.6bn transactions have been invalidated, representing estimated savings of $8.5m and average client ROI of 3770 per cent. It boasts customers including Rappi and Go-Jek.

Rappi has been able to mitigate an average of 25 per cent of their click traffic, peaking at 40 per cent on some days. It has also seen return on ad spend (ROAS) improve 25 per cent through reduced waste in ad spent and improved performance, as well as improving LTV and install to first order.

The Effective Mobile Marketing Awards Ceremony takes place in London on 14 November. To book your place at this celebration of the best in mobile marketing, click here.

And remember, there’s still time to vote in our special 10th Anniversary Awards for Most Effective Brand of the Decade; Agency of the Decade; and Disruptor of the Decade. Click here to vote now.

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This is the second time that Upstream has exposed the ‘Weather Forecast: World Weather Accurate Radar’ app for its actions. In January, the app was caught triggering false premium transactions and harvesting consumer data. This led to the app stopping its background activity and being withdrawn from the Play Store.

Despite Upstream’s initial discovery, its Secure-D mobile security platform detected and blocked 34m new suspicious transaction attempts from the app after just a two-month idle period. This time round the transaction attempts were seen on the preinstalled version of the app on Alcatel Pixi4 devices and affected almost 700,000 users in just six months.

“It seems lightening does strike twice. This weather app has lain low until the storm passed before returning to its old ways – with a spike in its rogue behaviour just a couple of months after it was reported and continuous suspicious activity in deliberate regulated volumes to continue siphoning funds but still go unnoticed,” said Upstream CEO Guy Krief.

Upstream advises the owners of Alcatel Pixi4 devices to check their phones for unusual behaviour and also check their bills for any unexpected charges.

Earlier this year, Upstream found that another popular Chinese Android app was triggering ‘suspicious background activity’ affecting over half a billion users. It was uncovered that streaming video app VidMate was using software to deliver invisible ads, generate fake clicks and purchases, install other suspicious apps, and collect user data.

The post Popular weather app has been making suspicious transactions without user consent appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Snapchat has teamed up with DoubleVerify, a digital media measurement software and analytics platform, to enable brands to measure viewability and prevent ad fraud.

The partnership means that brands are now able to authenticate the quality of Snapchat campaigns using DoubleVerify’s viewability and fraud verification technology. DoubleVerify’s technology will provide coverage across Snapchat’s filter, lens, Snap ad, and story ad formats.

“DV’s mission is to give advertisers clarity and confidence in their digital investment – across buying platforms, channels and media formats,” said Wayne Gattinella, CEO of DoubleVerify. “Our partnership with Snapchat deepens DV’s quality coverage across the social media ecosystem.”

DoubleVerify already partners with Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter to offer its technology.

“Measurement across platforms can vary dramatically,” added Gattinella. “DV uses consistent evaluation standards across environments – including web, mobile app and social, making it easier for advertisers to benchmark performance across their entire media plan.”

The post Snapchat pens ad fraud and viewability deal with DoubleVerify appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

$1 in every $3 spent on digital advertising is believed to be lost to ad fraud, with 8.3 per cent of all ad impressions found to be fraudulent and 25 per cent of app installations found to be fake.

This whitepaper covers:

• The state of ad fraud
• Types of ad fraud
• How to combat ad fraud
• Tips for prevention and cure of ad fraud

Let Nexd be your guide to the murky, often mysterious world of ad fraud, and how to defeat it.

The post Ad fraud and how to fight it appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Facebook has filed a lawsuit against two Asian app developers for running fraudulent advertising operations which exploited people’s devices.

Hong Kong-based LionMobi and Singapore-based JediMobi have been accused of ‘click injection’ fraud. It is claimed the pair created malicious apps and introduced them to the Google Play store to infect people’s phones. Once a user had installed one of the apps on their phone, the malware would generate fake user clicks on Facebook ads, giving the impression that ‘real’ people had clicked on the ads and tricking Facebook’s advertising network to pay out for those clicks.

“LionMobi and JediMobi generated unearned payouts from Facebook for misrepresenting that a real person had clicked on the ads,” said Jessica Romero, director of platform enforcement and litigation at Facebook, in a blog post. “The ads were part of Facebook’s Audience Network. LionMobi also advertised its malicious apps on Facebook, in violation of our Advertising Policies.”

Both LionMobi and JediMobi have been banned from the Facebook Audience Network and all affected advertisers have been refunded. Facebook did not announce how many users it believes were affected or how much money it may have paid out to the accused parties.

The post Facebook sues pair of app developers over alleged ad fraud appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Bidstack, an in-game advertising firm, has acquired ad fraud prevention platform Pubguard to protect its gaming inventory by removing fraudulent ads and help give advertisers a brand safe environment to run campaigns.

Pubguard’s image and code recognition technologies review creatives served in-app and on mobile web and desktop web to identify malicious ad content and malware which can be blocked by the client. The acquisition will see this AI technology integrated into Bidstack’s SDK.

“As custodians of studio directors’ artwork, the prevention of fraudulent advertising is a priority for us.  Pubguard brings a number of technical and commercial upsides to Bidstack.  First, we are protecting gamers against fake adverts that, for example, could redirect them to adult content.  Second, Pubguard brings the group technology and a brand that is respected in the gaming and digital media space,” said James Draper, Bidstack CEO.

“As we have said previously, our intention is to grow Bidstack to become a significant media owner in the video games market.  While we continue with organic development, I believe the purchase of Pubguard, our first venture into growth by acquisition, is just the start of what we see as an aggressive growth period.

“Wed like to welcome the Pubguard team into the Bidstack family and we look forward to growing the business further.”

The Pubguard team will join Bidstack at the London gaming and eSports hub, Here East. They will work together to develop ad fraud prevention technology, define in-game viewability, and refine data processes.

“Due to high levels of user engagement we’ve seen gaming brands targeted by fraudsters, so it makes sense for us to focus on an area of great need with the fantastic team at Bidstack,” said Justin Wenczka, Pubguard CEO. “Gaming is part of our company culture, so we know the huge potential of unlocking multi-platform ad spaces and the need for increased safety measures to protect its sensitive demographics. Bidstack has a tremendous focus and comprises of some of the best talent in the industry and we’re looking forward to achieving great things together moving forward.”

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