What Google and YouTube’s alleged advertising scandal says about the industry

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The following is a guest piece by Sean Cunningham, CEO and president of the Video Advertising Bureau. The opinions are the authors’ own.

For a few minutes, let’s put aside the questions of today’s advertising market about Analytics’ revelations of a Google/YouTube ad fraud scandal. Let’s look beyond the questions of: Did they really burn 1,100 major advertisers over three years with useless non-ads in really bad places and count it all as premium inventory? and let us ask the much bigger question why would an ad seller do that?

I believe the answer to why lies in an indictment of the ad industry’s all too willful non-oversight of Google and YouTube.

Google might because of compromised transparency standards that have succumbed to walled gardens, they might because of an all-encompassing ambition on the part of buyers to find a cheaper scale as a perpetual must to top grades and keep accounts. They might, because of the indisputable truth in walled garden oversight like Google, you can see what they make you see.

The walled gardens cave-in on (non-)transparency has led Google to display merit badges just like the TV of reviewer accreditation, even badges that start with the words verified, certified, secure, and trusted. All the badge givers were compromised into agreeing they would never get behind Google’s walls (I’m sure they asked nicely) and failed to achieve any level of data transparency comparable to third-party TV data standards; instead settling for whatever first-party data Google allowed them to see. The badges then aided the game’s easy picks, who on the buying side had the time or inclination to inquire behind family badges which could help authorize the purchase of as much Google/YouTube as you want or dare it’s all super legit (and super efficient!).

Assuming that Google’s Ad Fraud Analytics report is accurate, the real expensive play has been played directly on the math of the buy/sell market itself.

In the wake of the scale and duration of the fraud revelations, a bright young man armed with that data from Analytics is right now quantifying the artificial price pressure Google has been able to put on other sellers by means of phantom scale and empty impressions, all of which have been counted as price wins on the buy side. Given an estimated $13 billion advertisers lost to ads that violate Google’s standards, no one on the buy side was burned more than advertisers and their brands, so the damage was cumulative and exponential.

So, is this the last time we will see massive ad fraud by Walled Gardens? How can you know?

As long as the industry maintains all transparency compromises and double standards between multi-screen TV and walled gardens like Google, we will always have to ask the same question: what could be the next big ad fraud scandal burning market advertisers/games?

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