juniperA new report from Juniper Research has found that advertisers will lose an estimated $19 billion to fraudulent activities next year, equivalent to $51 million per day. This figure, representing advertising on online and mobile devices, will continue to rise, reaching $44 billion by 2022.

Juniper’s new research, Future Digital Advertising – AI, Ad Fraud & Ad Blocking 2017-2022, claims that the ‘Walled Garden’, a closed platform approach whereby advertising platforms restrict the flow of advertising performance data to advertisers and publishers, must be abandoned to stimulate transparency between stakeholders. The report found that advertising fraud rates will continue to increase as a result of this, further hindering stakeholder efforts in tackling fraud.

Additionally, the research predicts that AI will be crucial in analyzing the vast amounts of data generated from advertising activities daily and minimizing loss due to fraud. Fraudsters will increasingly innovate in their approaches to imitate genuine advertising activity including simulated clicks, mouse movements and social network accounts.

“Fraudsters will continue to heavily invest in domains, user accounts and bot farms to appear genuine” argued research author Sam Barker. “Advertising stakeholders will demand constant vigilance against the threat of ad fraud, which will only be achieved through the correct implementation of AI services”.

Furthermore, the research forecasts that platforms leveraging AI for targeting purposes will account for 74% of total online and mobile advertising spend by 2022. However, as the adoption of AI becomes saturated, only platforms demonstrating the most effective algorithms will be able to charge premium prices to advertisers.

According to the study, these platforms will need to focus on new data sources to improve the proficiency of their AI algorithms. Data from IoT devices, information sharing partnerships and cross device user identification will therefore become highly sought-after.

Feel free to download Juniper Research’s complimentary whitepaper Ad Fraud: How AI will Rescue Your Budget. If you are interesting in getting more insights on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on reducing advertising fraud.

By MediaBUZZ