Inside Google's Anti-Fraud Team; FT Offers New Ad Metric

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Inside The Google Batcave

Ad Age reporter Alex Kantrowitz details the inner workings of Google’s anti-fraud team. The 100-person unit is led by Douglas de Jager, previously the founder of anti-fraud firm Spider.io, which Google bought last year. Until now, little was known about the particulars of the unit, or how exactly Google is battling botnets and fraud. Though the tech giant stands to lose the most to fraud, it is also in a position to lead the forces of good. According to the piece, Google is primed to share more of its data. “Mr. de Jager said his team is about to start publishing detailed information on bad traffic for the first time, providing … details on certain botnets it detects,” Kantrowitz writes. Read it.

CPM To CPH

The Financial Times rolled out a time-based ad metric on Monday called cost per hour (CPH), which aims to quell viewability and placement concerns that come with click-based measurement. “While CPM values every impression the same, CPH uses time to measure value,” said FT’s ad sales director, Dominic Good. “The FT has shown through extensive testing that brand familiarity and recollection among readers increases significantly the longer an ad is in view. Adverts seen for five seconds or more on FT.com show up to 50% higher brand recall and familiarity than ads that are visible for a shorter period of time.” The FT worked with Chartbeat to develop the metric, and an early group of 10 clients (including BP, iShares and IBM) generated more than $1 million in incremental revenue. More.

Defending TV’s Turf

As TV, OTT and digital video converge, the media companies that comprise the Cable Advertising Bureau (CAB) have shuttered the organization in favor of a more expansive org. The new group, the Video Advertising Bureau (VAB), is “a bigger, brawnier organization comprising 110 broadcast and cable networks and the 11 largest MVPDs,” Adweek reports. Sean Cunningham, who was CEO of CAB and holds the same position at VAB, said the change “accelerates our ability to view meaningful research and develop analytics.” Digital video, your move. Read on via Adweek.

OTT Explosion

Speaking of the television wars, data from Juniper Research out Monday suggests subscriber volume for service like Netflix, Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime Instant Video will total 333.2 million globally by 2019, up from 92.1 million in 2014. According to the report, VOD ad spend will grow nearly four-fold by 2019, and China is slated to surpass North America as the dominant marketplace. “The threat from OTT services has notably forced Verizon’s hand into bundling cheaper packages, minus sports channels,” reads the release. “Meanwhile, OTT players continue to strengthen their market position.” TechCrunch has more.

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