Beet.TV recently interviewed HUMAN’s Director of Product Management, Kristine Lopez for a new leadership series, Protecting CTV Media Investment From Ad Fraud.
Security standards are still being developed for connected television (CTV), leaving parts of its advertising infrastructure exposed to potential fraud. Cybersecurity firm HUMAN relies on a variety of indicators to help determine the authenticity of streaming viewership as fraudsters seek to mine a segment that has lucrative cost per thousand (CPM) metrics.
“Fraudsters like to find where CPMs are really high, where there’s a lot of value and where it’s easy to siphon some of that value out of the ecosystem. And CTV is a great example of that,” Kristine Lopez, director of product management at cybersecurity firm HUMAN, said in this interview.
“One thing that we need to do is have signal,” she said. “It’s insights on the device. It’s what is happening. We use that in order to detect anomalous behavior that’s indicative of fraud.”
Ad Supply-Chain Weaknesses
There are several points in the CTV ad supply chain that can help to detect fraud, including a CTV app, a viewing device such as a mobile phone or smart TV, server-side ad insertion (SSAI) communications and finally, the viewer.
“We have to look at those four points of exposure and how do we protect against that,” Lopez said. “This is still incredibly complicated because of all of the server-to-server communication that happens in delivering CTV ads.”
Aside from signals within a digital video stream, there are other indicators authenticity, such as information in app stores including reviews and verifying the identity of the app’s developers, she said.
“When we combine that with on-device telemetry, that creates a really strong high-fidelity confirmation that this is a human viewing a device that is a real app and real content,” Lopez said. “That’s the kind of view that we need to have.”
You can watch all videos in the series here.