Fraud risks are becoming more and more sophisticated. The ANAs Programmatic transparency benchmark for the second quarter of 2025 found that $26.8 billion in global programmatic media value is lost each year due to supply chain inefficiencies, fraud and poor-quality inventory.
Fraud is particularly prevalent in connected television (CTV) advertising. CTV, one of the fastest growing digital channels, has become the new playground for bad actors who know detection hasn’t kept up with spending.
Most marketers wrongly assume that the biggest threat lies in sophisticated fraud itself. This is not the case. The biggest threat is the passive assumption that someone else – a demand-side platform (DSP), an agency, a publisher partner – took care of the fraud.
It is this hypothesis which explains the leakage of budgets. Not all at once, but consistently, campaign after campaign. Exposing a fraud does not require deep technical knowledge, just the ability to ask the right questions and get real answers.
Here are four questions every programmatic advertiser should ask themselves. The answers become more difficult and more important as campaigns move from display to video to CTV.
Your customers are searching everywhere. Make sure your brand introduces himself.
The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need.
Start free trial
Start with
1. Where is my ad actually showing?
Before you can detect fraud, you need to understand where your ad is ending up. Programmatic ads pass through a chain of intermediaries, exchanges, resellers, and verification layers before reaching a publisher. This chain is called the supply path, and the more hops there are in it, the harder it is to know what you’ve actually purchased.
When displayed, your ads appear on websites and in apps. Ask your partner to guide you through the sourcing journey for your campaigns. Does your inventory come directly from trusted publishers or does it pass through a long chain of free-to-play resellers?
Display is also where page-level quality signals are most important. The industry is making real progress in this area, with new tools that surface granular page-level signals, such as ad density, refresh rate and content quality. This type of transparency is the direction every display advertiser should be pushing their partners.
In the video, ask the same question on the fulfillment path and add another: What type of reader loaded the ad?
Autoplaying in a silent corner of a page doesn’t feel the same as a pre-roll on a premium video property. Both may appear on your bill at similar prices. The same page-level signals apply to video running in web environments.
CTV is a different animal because CTV ads don’t run on pages. They run in apps: publisher apps like NBC and ESPN, streaming platform apps like Hulu, Max, and Paramount+, and free ad-supported streaming apps like Pluto TV and Tubi.
The question changes: which app claimed the print, and was it really that app? Scammers are spoofing both devices and apps, running prints on server farms that pretend to be Roku or Fire TV devices within a premium streaming app.
Ask your partner specifically what app- and device-level verification they perform, and which apps account for the bulk of your spend.
2. Who checks the traffic?
The bot detection displayed is mature. Independent verification vendors have spent years fine-tuning their filters, and the basic traffic hygiene on most DSPs is reasonable from the start.
Video is trickier because video ads are served in much more varied environments. Vendors can reliably track viewability, but catching sophisticated bots that mimic real-world viewing behavior requires more work.
CTV is the weak point. I’ve seen this pattern before over two decades in programming: Every time a channel evolves faster than detection can keep up, fraudsters are chasing the money.
You can probably guess what the CEO of a CTV company will say about this, but numbers are numbers. DoubleVerify’s Global Insights 2025 report found that Bot-driven activity accounted for 65% of CTV fraudwith around four million infected devices generating fake traffic daily.
Fewer independent vendors have reliable CTV detection, and bad actors know it. Don’t accept the blanket assurance that “fraud is filtered out.” Ask specifically what your partner’s CTV fraud detection looks like, which vendors do the filtering, and how much of your CTV impressions were removed in the last quarter.
If no one can produce this figure, we don’t measure you, we tell you a story.
3. Does anyone actually look at placement data?
Most marketers don’t want to live in placement reports, and that’s fair. Granular reporting is dense, and analyzing it is often one of the reasons you work with a partner in the first place.
Still, you need to know what your partner watches, how often, and what they signal when something is wrong.
When displayed, site-level placement data should serve as a baseline result. If your partner hands you summaries without indicating where your impressions took place, tap for more details or ask them to look through them. On videos, reporting on publishers and locations can get lost in vague categories. Request it by line item.
Stay current. Earlier in 2025, low-quality sites designed to capture ad dollars were the industry’s top placement concern, with hundreds of millions of dollars in open exchange spending continuing to flow into these areas.
The industry responded. Better detection, tighter inclusion lists, and shared research from companies like Jounce Media have reduced that exposure to a fraction of what it once was.
But the threats are changing. Jounce’s research conducted in mid-2025 found that unnecessary resale layers in the supply chain have now overtaken poor quality inventory as the leading source of waste in programmatic.
This finding ties directly into the supply path question from the first section: the more intermediaries there are between you and the publisher, the more budget slips away before your ad reaches a real person.
On CTV, application and network distributions are frequently grouped together in a way that hides the true composition of the inventory. You can’t spot these problems in a summary. You need a partner who takes care of the details and points out what’s out of place.
4. How organized are my direct transactions?
A quick definition: The open market is the vast layer of programming accessible to everyone, where stocks trade in real time. Direct transactions and private markets are pre-arranged purchases accessed via a transaction ID. The assumption is that a transaction ID signifies verified quality inventory.
This hypothesis deserves examination.
On average, private markets operate cleaner than open exchanges. The ANA is in progress Programmatic Transparency Benchmark confirms this.
But the averages hide a wide range. The same research shows that the least disciplined advertisers still have significant exposure to low-quality ad inventory, even within their curated deals, while the most disciplined perform almost flawlessly.
The difference is not the transaction ID, but what goes into the curation behind it.
On the display and video, ask your partner what is really happening in their private market transactions. Do they use page-level quality signals and third-party data to filter inventory, or do they aggregate everything the publisher offers and call it curated?
With CTV, direct deals with major networks, streaming platforms, and free streaming apps remain the cleanest route, but the same rule applies: a deal ID with no curation behind it is a label, not a guarantee.
The most recent ANA benchmark, released in February 2026, found that top-performing advertisers converted nearly 57% of their programmatic spend into quality, viewable, fraud-free impressions. Late advertisers converted less than 38%. This discrepancy is not a measurement quirk. This is the price of true curation.
Why Disciplined Advertisers Win
Fighting fraud is not a one-time setup task, but an ongoing discipline. Start with a green list of approved sites, apps, and networks, built from curated deals by partners doing real quality work at the page level. Think of blocklists as a reactive safety net, not a strategy. Also watch your own incentives: cheap CPMs buy you the cheapest impressions.
When a performance metric seems too good, treat the spike as a signal, not a victory. The advertisers who systematically ask these questions are the ones who know what their media is really worth. This strategy applies to display, video and especially CTV.
