When the Financial Times took on the fraudsters

Sam Peña-Taylor

The Financial Times favours direct relationships with advertisers which theoretically reduces its exposure to fraud.

The Financial Times, the pink-papered broadsheet, enjoys a very valuable audience. Its advertising inventory is necessarily expensive and it favours direct relationships with advertisers, selling just 5% of its total inventory programmatically. However, in September last year, the FT found video ads on FT.com listed on 15 different ad exchanges and display ads listed on a further ten.

This came as a bit of an unpleasant shock, even if it wasn’t a total surprise, John Slade, the paper’s chief commercial officer, told the ISBA annual conference (London, March 2018). Despite the small inventory available on the paper’s website, its ads...

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