Impact Radius puts ad fraud in sights with opening of first Australian office
Australian advertisers are just as exposed to digital ad fraud as business in the US and Europe as criminal interests continue to target vulnerabilities in real time trading desks, a new entrant to digital marketing space in Australia has warned.
Daniel Karlsson warns Australian advertisers facing increased exposure to fraud
Opening its first Australian office, Impact Radius claims to be the first digital marketing platform in the world with built-in ad fraud detection – with managing director Daniel Karlsson warning that Australia was far from immune from global fraud trends.
“Digital marketing does not have a regional flavour to it,” Karlsson said.
“What I mean by that is that all the media buyers and the exchanges and the publishers, they operate on a global scale, and at the end of the day the people with (criminal) intentions will follow where the money is.
“We don’t see Australia as any different from any other market.”
Impact Radius has been operating with a number of Australian clients for several years but is scaling up the operation with the opening of a local office.
The Asia Pacific region is predicted to overtake North America as the world’s largest digital advertising market in the next year.
Karlsson said he believed marketing platforms and ad fraud systems needed to be fully integrated to allow advertisers the ability to have a single, trusted view of the consumer journey from ad impression through to acquisition.
At the same time he said that as mobile became the predominant target for advertisers, it was particularly vulnerable to fraud.
“If we look at stats that we see from independent firms as well as what our own data and research show us, ad fraud is a massive issue,” he said.
“It’s been quoted as globally the second source of income for organised crime after drugs. So particularly if you look at RTB platforms we see an enormous rise of fraud in mobile.
It’s a big issue and advertisers are wasting millions of dollars a year and collectively billions of dollars a year in advertising spend that is really wasted because there is not a single human that is seeing their ad, or that’s clicking on it or that’s installing the app.
“It’s all fake, it’s what we refer to as non-human traffic.
With the predicted scale of the regional market, he said it was vital for Impact Radius to establish a local presence.
“Asia Pacific is a vital region for us to fuel the next phase of our expansion,” Karlsson said.
“It will allow us to better support our growing global client base including Lenovo, Airbnb, Getty Images, McAfee and expand our footprint with local advertisers and agencies who are demanding greater return on investment of their marketing spend.”
He said while Australian marketers were aware of ad fraud as a growing issue, he believed more needed to be done to show them the scale of the problem at a local level.
“The issue is real and we (Impact Radius) invest in great people and great infrastructure, and for us the trick really is to start with the right organisations and gather what their current media buying behaviour is and then help them understand where there is risk.”
He said the business scaled in Europe over the past two years and with the expansion of the Asian market he expected the business to have a similar trajectory locally with the opening of the local office.
