Something smells rotten in digital advertising (and inventory quality is to blame)
Fraud and the absence of valid metrics often bleed digital advertising budgets.
The budget pressures advertisers currently face and the side effects directly emanating from ubiquitous AI are exacerbating a problem that has plagued digital advertising almost since the beginning of time: low quality inventory.
And although investment in digital advertising continues to grow at a good pace, much of that investment is completely squandered as a result of fraud, the lack of real visibility, the mass production of «AI Slop» or digital garbage and glaring deficiencies from a measurement point of view.
At a time when AI is supposedly the engine of efficiency, this technology is paradoxically giving wings to fraud by allowing bots to roam freely on the Internet and promoting the creation of the increasingly ubiquitous MFA (Made For Advertising) websites, which simulate supposedly human activity, but which do not, however, translate into a real commercial impact.
According to different studies, one in every three advertising impressions may not reach the eyes of real people on the Internet, which ultimately translates into multimillion-dollar losses for advertisers. The “Media Quality Report 2025” report by Integral Ad Science (IAS) estimates, not in vain, that advertising fraud resulted in losses of $100 billion in 2024.
AI has only aggravated the problems that digital advertising usually faces
The minimum standards of «viewability» are also the subject of controversy in the universe of digital advertising, standards that, after all, assign the label of view to an advertising impression for just one or two seconds of partial exposure. Additionally, practices such as frequency capping (which limits how many times a user views an ad in a given period of time) are often not implemented properly.
To this long list of problems we must also add the resistance of large digital platforms to accept independent measurements and the absence of truly effective «cross-media» metrics on the open web, says Juliane Paperlein in an article for Horizont.
In such a complex context, advertisers demand quality, but simultaneously cut costs directly associated with agencies and measurement, which does not substantially reduce control over where and how digital advertising makes its way on the Internet.
Furthermore, while some advertisers are working to put quality, transparency and brand safety at the center of the digital advertising debate, the conflict between the massive reach of online ads and the safe environments in which they operate remains unresolved.
What seems clear in any case is that not monitoring the quality of the channels where digital advertising ends up emerging to the surface is very often synonymous with waste of advertising budget. And while advertising budgets are expected to be frozen in 2026, the problems that digital advertising is dealing with today will unfortunately continue to loom as a bad shadow over this discipline also next year.
Source: www.marketingdirecto.com
