Category: management

Academic articles within the discipline of management including strategy and marketing.

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Pitfalls and Fraud in Online Advertising Metrics: What Makes Advertisers Vulnerable to Cheaters, and How They Can Protect Themselves

Edelman, Benjamin. “Pitfalls and Fraud in Online Advertising Metrics: What Makes Advertisers Vulnerable to Cheaters, and How They Can Protect Themselves.” Journal of Advertising Research 54, no. 2 (June 2014): 127-132.

How does online advertising become less effective than advertisers expect and less effective than measurements indicate? The current research explores problems that result, in part, from malfeasance by outside perpetrators who overstate their efforts to increase their measured performance. In parallel, similar vulnerabilities result from mistaken analysis of cause and effect–errors that have become more fundamental as advertisers target their advertisements with greater precision. In the paper that follows, the author attempts to identify the circumstances that make advertisers most vulnerable, notes adjusted contract structures that offer some protections, and explores the origins of the problems in participants’ incentives and in legal rules.

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Who Owns Metrics?: Building a Bill of Rights for Online Advertisers

Edelman, Benjamin. “Who Owns Metrics?: Building a Bill of Rights for Online Advertisers.” Journal of Advertising Research 49, no. 4 (December 2009). (Adapted from Towards a Bill of Rights for Online Advertisers.)

I offer five rights to protect advertisers from increasingly powerful ad networks-avoiding fraudulent charges for services not rendered, guaranteeing data portability so advertisers get the best possible value, and assuring price transparency so advertisers know what they’re buying. I explain the need for these rights by presenting specific practices causing particular concern.

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The Dark Underbelly of Online Advertising

Edelman, Benjamin. “The Dark Underbelly of Online Advertising.” HBR Now. (November 17, 2009).

The Internet is sold to advertisers as a highly measurable medium that is the most efficient way to target exactly the right customers. But online advertising is also easily subverted–letting fraudsters claim advertising fees for work they did not actually do. The trickiest frauds deceive advertisers so effectively that measurements of ad effectiveness report the fraudsters as exceptionally productive and high quality, rather than revealing that their traffic was actually worthless. This is a quiet scandal. In a time of tightening ad budgets, losses to advertising fraud come straight from the bottom line–but savings can be equally dramatic. Here’s a look behind the veil–an explanation of ad practices that have cheated even the Web’s largest advertisers. Advertising scams take plenty of victims, both witting and not, but I offer strategies to help determined marketers protect themselves.