CTV consumption surges but so does bot fraud

Connected TV consumption is surging and advertising is following – GroupM puts global CTV spend at $19.7bn in 2022 rising to $23.2bn this year and $26.9bn in 2024 – but those figures also make it a prime target for fraud.

DoubleVerify’s 2023 Global Insights Report analysed trends from nearly 5.5 trillion media transactions across over 1,000 customers in nearly 100 countries and found bot fraud on CTV was up 69% in 2022.

Why it matters

As a company focused on authenticating the quality of digital media, DoubleVerify argues that the findings demonstrate the need for always-on verification across channels in order to drive consistent performance. 

“When verification is turned off or not applied, an advertiser becomes vulnerable to the swings in quality caused by unpredictable news cycles and increasingly sophisticated fraud schemes,” says Collette Spagnolo, vice president of marketing analytics at DoubleVerify. 

Takeaways

• The number of CTV fraud schemes and variants detected annually has tripled since 2020.
• For unprotected advertisers, the risk is significant: unprotected campaigns experienced a fraud rate of 11.2% compared with 0.6% for protected campaigns – a difference of nearly 18x.
• EMEA saw a 15% reduction in fraud/SIVT violations in 2022, but brand suitability violations spiked to 10.6% (a 13% increase from the previous year) – the highest of any region.