Ads for Singtel, P&G, POSB and Toyota found on unlicensed streaming websites highlight failing of automated media buying

This is why I find the argument from advertisers that ad blocking is immoral and depriving content creators of revenue difficult to take. Advertisers have been supporting pirate sites that deprive content creators for years – how do you think Kim Dotcom got so rich?

[Disclaimer: I work for Grapeshot, a contextual targeting business who’s product offering includes brand safety on programmatic campaigns in over 30 languages]

Firstly, I feel this article smarts a little [a lot in fact] of sensationalism, even for Mumbrella, as no opinion is mooted nor a solution. It’s just a collection of screen grabs and comments. The fact that “Mumbrella was alerted to a series of banner ads running on sites that illegally stream live sports…last week” suggests someone somewhere has an axe to grind and this article is just designed to either cast a dark light over programmatic in general or alienate a select few clients / agencies / campaigns…

Either way, pretty poor form in my opinion.

Secondly, I have to disagree with part of what you say Neal.

Ad blockers are user-initiated browser / app integrations which have taken off because advertising is not seen as relevant to an individual: relevance being derived via either behaviour or context. It’s the broad, untargeted advertising ‘spamming’ that users feel aggrieved by and are trying to block. If ads are relevant to the person consuming the content there is no need to block them.

In these cases, who’s to say this is not relevant content to the user? Inventory only exists because a person is viewing a page [forget about bots and fraud for a minute]. These ads may have been served to users who fit demographic and usage profiles. We don’t know who took the screen grabs nor do we know their browsing history nor the campaign targeting parameters [not there ulterior motives for doing so in the first place].

To your thought, Neal, that advertisers are deliberately supporting (targeting) these sites: their ads happen to appear on them because the bid pressure for inventory is low on untargeted programmatic strategies thus the eCPM is equally low which helps traders achieve unrealistically low eCPM campaign goals. But they also appear here because the correct precautions are not put in place.

Perhaps a question then is why are these sites available for campaign delivery on exchanges in the first place?

Products to prevent delivery on these sites are widely available to exchanges, agencies and trading desks (and DMP’s, SSP’s and any other form of targeting, retargeting, profiling and inventory management platforms) but whether they feel they want to pay for them or not is another story. Perhaps a risk and reward situation and here some campaigns got caught out.

Usually, at point of buying, the ‘cost’ of these products is batted back to the vendors by agencies as “the client won’t pay for it”. Maybe this highlights the need for agencies, and clients, to think in terms of ‘value’ versus cost rather than expect the mass-exchanges to be solely responsible for the trillions of URL’s available to their buyers.

Agencies just using blacklists will ALWYS be caught out : back in 2010 Optenet estimated as much as 37% of all online traffic came from porn and Webroot have stated “25% of all search engine queries are related to pornography, or about 68 million search queries a day”. My own company last month blocked over 15 billion URL’s flagged as “illegal download / sharing” [and that’s just for content in English language, we blocked more including the other languages] and a total of 1.2 TRILLION URL’s in total as not safe for client campaigns : show me a client / agency Blacklist that can keep up with that!

If I were one of these brands I’d be pretty upset at being a screen shot in an article like this on Mumbrella, especially if all the solutions were made available but I’d declined the cost. If I were one of the agencies mentioned, I’d be pretty concerned about the possibility of losing an account if I’d failed to present the client with all the available protection options.

So back to my sensationalism comment: is the point of this article to highlight that agencies are not using the available tools, or that clients aren’t aware of the tools, or that ultimately agencies are being forced into including ‘illegal sites’ due to agreeing to unrealistic eCPM goals by unforgiving clients, or that exchanges are allowing ‘illegal’ sites into their networks without proper controls, or even just to put the cat amongst the pigeons right before some of the accounts go up for pitch?

How is this failure of automated media buying? If the ad reached the right audience, it was a success.

The failure is in the Ad Exchange inventory manager in recruiting a website that is not following the rules.

The advertiser, nor the agency, nor the technology failed here.

Do your homework folks.

Visit an advertiser website, get retargeted, hit F5 all day long, take screengrab, … Assume brands and agencies are actually buying on streaming sites. Great journalism!

Online media buying stinks. This highlights the tip of the iceberg. Appearances on less than legit sited pales in comparison with fabricated appearances which no human sees. As for the accusation that this is less than pristine journalism perhaps you would prefer a series of cut and paste press releases and dire opinion pieces. Plenty of trade pubs do that.

This is a very misleading reporting !
Shouldn’t this be the classic example to highlight how the brand-safe issues can be addressed and avoided via programmatic buy instead ?
What I see from the given example is merely the GDN or other ad network’s limitation to be brand-safe and the affected advertisers should consider programatic buy wink emoticon

Perception is everything and if advertisers perceive their ad dollars are being wasted and/or are supporting illegal activities, then its a problem. And one that Mumbrella is right to at least draw attention to, unlike other trade sites that release reams of paid and unpaid programmatic PR peices.

Nice work Mumbrella, if you don’t expose these issues, who will?

YOure presuming that people who are on these streaming, porn and gambling sites actually give two shits about these stupid banner ads.

Two things:

Did the author bother to investigate whether any of these clients are running their own desks and basically just use their agencies to manage IOs? Just a thought.

Secondly, did the author ask any of them about their retargeting strategies? As is pointed out above, it’s the digital media equivalent of a honey trap and if why do many trade journalists write stories like this about ads near p0rn content, not raising that all they are doing is advertising that they are w@nkers.

In this instance we could just read this as an admission that the journalists here are heavy users of streaming sites.

Love the sound of an axe grinding.

Ads dollar is spent on reaching the audience
If your targeted audience (user who have previously booked and fly with Swiss Air) is spending most of their online time on free streaming sites; programmatically, DMP will retarget these user and load the ads wherever they go.

The article starting doesnt take in account user behaviour, context, or the quality of SSP (notice how all the ads DCM?)

Pointing fingers & calling out agency who rans the media campaign is not helpful to educate advertiser on buying media through RTB.

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Interesting that most of these ads were delivered by Google.