The Wild West of Advertising on a path to be a Little Less Wild

The rapid rise of digital marketing has created an interesting dynamic between regulators and scammers as they innovate in attempt to stay one step ahead of each other. The latest trick from the scammers in the UK is to use fake celebrity endorsements to promote a brand and trick consumers. Celebrity Martin Lewis was the victim of fake ads falsifying his endorsement for new Bitcoin get rich quick schemes. In response Lewis announced that he was suing Facebook, claiming that the false ads caused damage to his reputation and his livelihood.

Lewis and Facebook recently reached a settlement on the terms that Facebook will provide a £3 million donation to the local Citizens Advice scams action project to establish a scam advice bureau to protect consumers from falsified ads. Additionally, Facebook UK will experiment with adding a button to allow users to flag ad as being “fake”. For now, the feature will only be tested in the UK but could be rolled out worldwide in the future.

The rise of digital advertising has certainly outpaced the regulations surrounding the space. As Lewis puts it, digital advertising is like the Wild West right now. As money continues to pour into digital advertising there will be an increase in focus placed on the regulation of the industry.

"This is an absolute Wild West with people sitting all over the world, and with very little regulation, no criminal enforcement" - Martin Lewis

Currently, Facebook is in the spotlight, but Lewis is also turning his attention to Google and Yahoo. The digital advertising platforms have made it incredibly easy to post an ad; which is a double-edged sword since it easily enables the scammers. As a result, the responsibility for policing these ads is rightfully being placed on the platforms who have the right to control who is posting these ads – not to mention the billions of dollars in revenue they pull in each year from advertising. With the enormous volume of ads served on these platforms each day, even filtering out 99.9% of malicious ads could still be problematic. Moving forward to what standards is the public going to hold these sheriffs to?