When it comes to TV, OTT is the advertising industry’s latest obsession, providing marketers with the ability to precisely target consumers on the big screen. And with initial research showing that 72% of viewers recall OTT ads, advertisers are doubling down on OTT which is expected to grow to $5 billion in ad spend this year. But we still need to address the elephant in the room...

A recent study from AdLedger predicts marketers will waste $1.4 billion on fraudulent OTT ads in 2019, with advanced TV advertising company MadHive finding that 20% of streaming video ad requests fraudulent, Digiday reports. The predominant methods of fraud on the platform closely resemble digital - bots, spoofing, misrepresentation - and are quickly becoming a common occurrence.

TVREV sat down with Christiana Cacciapuoti, the Executive Director at AdLedger, to learn more about the consortium’s fraud findings and how members like Publicis, Omnicom, Hershey and Hearst are working together and using cryptography to fight it. 

Here’s the interview transcript.

We put out a fraud and OTT white paper where we detailed many of the ways that we were observing fraud entering the ecosystem with research contributed by many of our members, especially MadHive and Beachfront. And so what we found was a few really interesting schemes were going on that very closely near in digital so for one, we were seeing a lot of bot traffic Of course, where you know, especially on traffic, that is Ott, but is being shown on a desktop computer, so a long-form piece of content. But being shown on on desktop computer is exactly the same as digital so there are bots there.

Other things we saw were apps spamming the system with many different requests for an actual human is not watching 15 different 32nd ads in the same minute is physically impossible. And then there were also interesting circadian data where, you know, real humans go to sleep sometimes and sometimes they're awake and we were seeing a good amount of content coming in with a very kind of steady number of requests no matter what hour of the day it was, which was interesting as well.