I recently read an article in the Wall Street Journal about ComScore, a new company that wants to "clean up" online advertising, but in a way that I hadn't ever considered. Apparently, quite often marketers buy ads, but humans never see them. Either the websites are "viewed" by bots instead of by real people, or the ads are displayed somewhere that real users never actually see. ComScore's business is ranking ad merchants by trust-ability, so that if you buy from one of them, you have some idea of how trustworthy they are. Presumably, if they are trustworthy, you can buy confidently and not worry that bots and hidden deep pages will be the only things that see your ads.
Now, for one thing I really admire ComScore's business model and their mission. But this has really made me think about just how vulnerable digital marketers are. Like Stevenson's cow, they are "Blown by all the winds that pass/And wet with all the showers." Whether it's Google changing their algorithms, or your ads only being seen by bots, or negative SEO from a competitor. Digital marketing seems like a constant struggle against unpredictable external forces. This must be extremely frustrating - you spend time developing an ad campaign and deploying over the web, only to doubt whether anyone is actually watching. All of those useful metrics that come from Digital Marketing are now suspect, and then how are you supposed to use the data if you can't trust it? What is worse, you will never even know how much of your "viewers" were (and are) real, and what is even worse than that is that you cannot know, no matter what happens. That knowledge is simply inaccessible. It's vitally important to keep the bots and fake pages at bay, because they have the potential in Market for Lemons style to drive out all of the good ad traffic; they therefore pose a huge threat to the legitimate Digital Marketing industry as a whole. It's not just a nuisance, and it's good that ComScore is opening up a counterattack.
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