In the wake of a PR battle over fraudulent ad traffic, programmatic buying platform Rocket Fuel is daring marketers to try and find a cleaner, safer environment for their ads.
The company has issued a “Quality Assurance Challenge” to marketers, which recommends they screen any DSP, network or exchange they use with an accredited verification provider. Rocket Fuel recently had 34 of its campaigns, comprising of 142 million impressions, screened by third-party fraud detection specialist Forensiq, the company that made this watch-a-bot video. The firm found that only 3.7% of Rocket Fuel’s buys were at “high risk” of non-human traffic, much lower than industry-wide estimates of 20-40%.
Rocket Fuel is now challenging marketers to put their platforms to the same test, and publicly share their findings.
In May, Rocket Fuel faced scrutiny after the Financial Times reported a video campaign it had done for BMW was rife with fraud. More than half (57%) of the 365,000 impressions bought in a three week period of the campaign were found to be suspicious, according to UK verification firm Telemetry. In response, Rocket Fuel said it had made good on the problem impressions with BMW and that the fraud exposure rate through the entire campaign — not just a small sample from those three weeks — was 6%.
With the Quality Assurance Challenge, Rocket Fuel is looking to establish a leadership position in the fight against fraud. The company said its platform evaluates 58 billion impressions each day and rejects 40% of them on suspicion of fraud. That’s not quite as high as, say, competitor Videology, which claims to reject all but 10% of open exchange impressions.
In a parallel initiative, Rocket Fuel is releasing a free fraud detection package that any buyer can use to check media they’ve bought. Though the tool, Traffic Scanner, isn’t intended to be a replacement for third-party verification, Rocket Fuel’s Ari Levenfeld, senior director of privacy & inventory quality, said he hopes it will be useful as a starting point. “We believe the industry needs a freely available “first look at the numbers” solution that cuts through the FUD and leads to increased trust and value in the ecosystem,” he said, in a release.
Since Traffic Scanner isn’t yet accredited by the Media Rating Council, it can’t be used to take the Challenge — that has to be done with an independent provider like comScore, DoubleVerify or Integral Ad Science.
“I cannot stress enough how important we feel it is for marketers and providers in the industry to adopt the standard practice of using a third party from the [IAB Anti-Fraud Working Group] to evaluate and report on traffic quality,” Levenfield said.
