It has been just a few working days since the Adalytics revelations of a major YouTube ad fraud scandal that duped 1,000 major advertisers over the past three years.
The crux is that YouTube was charging a premium for assured high-quality ad placements in the safest YouTube environments. But, in actuality, those ads were routinely placed in the least desirable places: the lowest-tier sites that generate a mountain of useless impressions while risking brand damage with every compromised (fraudulent) ad placement.
Many of us are waiting to see the right level of outrage directed at YouTube from advertisers and agencies.
What’s the right level of outrage? As one advertiser said to me: “Can you imagine the reaction and consequences if this fraud was done by TV? There would be absolute hell to pay.”
Holding YouTube accountable
We can all imagine what would happen if TV service providers perpetuated such a betrayal of trust and knowingly did damage to a wide group of major advertisers just to prop up their own numbers.
It would be considered unconscionable to inflict that kind of damage on their ad clients. It’s only fitting that YouTube, which has long coveted TV’s ad dollars and advertisers, should find out what it feels like to be treated as if it were TV.
What should the consequences look like?
For one thing, this level of fraud warrants outrage and immediate consequences from brands’ CMOs. There should be demands for financial reparations from YouTube. And YouTube should be pulled in front of the ANA board to answer a room full of very tough questions. There should be calls for remedy from the heads of agency holding companies and an announced suspension of ad dollars to YouTube until named conditions are met. The industry needs real transparency from YouTube to ensure something like this can never happen again.
As not seen on TV
Fortunately for all of TV’s advertising partners (including the many who also bought YouTube), there’s a reason this type and scale of fraud is actually “unimaginable” on TV.
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That’s because it literally couldn’t happen on TV. There are enough third parties involved in currency and verification to prevent this from ever happening for any period of time – let alone three years.
Then there’s the most obvious reason TV could never get away with generating empty impressions at scale for any significant duration. Over 800 of the newest advertisers on national TV are mostly analytics-first companies (DTCs, etc.) that would detect any significant volume of unproductive impressions and quickly shift their dollars elsewhere.
The fact that the vast majority of those 800 new-to-TV advertisers continually increase their TV ad investments is because TV doesn’t produce or sell empty or unproductive impressions.
To all those CMOs and agency heads mulling over what their reaction to YouTube’s scandal should be: YouTube should be treated like TV. Channel your outrage over YouTube’s ad fraud into holding the platform to the same trust standard that’s been long established in television. In this instance, YouTube deserves it.
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