Roku – the CTV device manufacturer and streaming service provider – will launch an advertising watermark technology to help advertisers and service providers combat ad fraud. The solution – offered by Roku for free – will tackle “spoofing” fraud schemes in which fake inventory is created across a large number of devices, apps and IP addresses, therefore resulting in impressions being sold to ad scammers. The watermark technology will be integrated with Roku’s operating system to automatically verify impressions and ad requests, so advertisers know they are reaching real users.
Both FOX and Discovery have said they will use Roku’s watermark solution to verify their inventory, and ad technology providers Google, HUMAN, Basic Technologies, Innovid and Magnite, have announced they will be integrating the technology after it is rolled out. Roku-owned OneView will be the first ad buying platform to offer inventory automatically validated by the solution.
Louqman Parampath, VP of Product Management at Roku, said “As America’s No. 1 TV Streaming Platform, we are uniquely positioned to help the industry preempt device spoofing. This is powerful and free technology that will help advertisers accelerate their shift to TV streaming with even more confidence.”
Bill Murray, Vice President of Programmatic Solutions, Discovery, commented “Roku’s Advertising Watermark assures our advertiser clients that they are buying genuine Discovery inventory on Roku devices. We’re excited that Roku has brought its data, operating system, and ad technology together to easily prevent ad spoofing.”
Ad verification platform DoubleVerify analysed over a trillion CTV ad impressions across 80 markets between May 2020 and June 2021, and found significant adoption of spoofing scams over bot scams by fraudsters. Bot scams experienced a 44% drop, and over the period observed 36% of all CTV fraud was conducted through spoofing. DoubleVerify reports that, in Q4 2021, 18% of unprotected CTV ads traded programmatically were either invalid traffic or fraud.
