The coming of artificial intelligence (AI) into the digital advertising ecosystem has brought both opportunities and challenges for marketers in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region.
Companies are facing AI-driven ad fraud, which threatens the integrity of the advertising world.
DoubleVerify published a report, "Global Insights: 2024 APAC Report," which stated that over 50% of APAC marketers are worried that AI is taking the advertising industry to a darker side. They have given their expertise that AI will ruin the quality of ads.
This fear has come out from the AI depicting human behavior, where you can't predict what is true and false.
Tinee Cruz, Senior Sales Director of DoubleVerify Philippines, spoke at the DigiCon Revolution 2024 event, stating, "The growing threat of AI-driven fraud schemes targeting high-value media environments such as Connected TV (CTV) and mobile platforms."
She also added, "The necessity of real-time detection tools, including AI-powered solutions like Fraud AI and Classification AI, to effectively combat these sophisticated fraud attempts."
The report indicates that there was a 23% increase in new fraud schemes and variants in 2023 as compared to the previous years. Furthermore, the advertisers feel that the situation will be menacing in the future as AI evolves, and there will be no barricading to stop it.
Here, the prime example would be CycloneBot, a malicious AI bot that disrupted the advertising industry via its fake ads. It generated up to 250 million falsified ad requests and imitated around 1.5 million devices daily. All this process caused a hit of $7.5 million monthly to unprotected advertisers.
In spite of these difficulties, the APAC region continues to have a comparatively low fraud rate. The fraud/sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) rate in APAC is at 0.8%, the lowest in the world. On the contrary, the Philippines has a 0.7% fraud rate, which is a 43% reduction compared to last year.
Nonetheless, CTV continues to be the device exhibiting the highest fraud rate in APAC, with 37% of fraud/SIVT happening through mobile apps, while mobile applications account for 92% of all adware/malware SIVT.
The increase in AI-enabled ad fraud has led industry specialists to recommend the implementation of sophisticated AI-based tools. These systems have the capacity to identify and stop deceptive practices.
Furthermore, they will help brands to know that their digital advertisements meet media quality standards. Hence, this will become suitable for their brand, thus safeguarding their investments.
The only task is not only to handle ad frauds but also to secure consumer engagement because once the customer is lost due to these false activities, it will be challenging to acquire it.
The region's Attention Index shows that consumer engagement is lagging behind digital ad spend growth. As a matter of fact, the Philippines recorded the lowest average at 108.
This number shows the potential for enhancing engagement optimization. Furthermore, it pushed the brands towards using creative methods to assess attention and enhance campaigns for significant engagement. This step will improve campaign outcomes and return on ad spend (ROAS) - all at once!
As AI technology advances, it brings both obstacles and possibilities for brands. Although scammers utilize AI to create increasingly advanced schemes, this same technology can be employed to improve campaign effectiveness and protect against new dangers to media integrity.
AI will evolve in the coming years with new algorithms. This will lead to more ad fraud and, ultimately, loss to the advertisers. So, to prevent these acts from happening, marketers should remain vigilant and start using new technologies to learn about these frauds.
They should keep themselves updated with the latest news articles and updates on social media platforms.