Quote:A massive television ad fraud campaign that abuses the programmatic advertising ecosystem for connected TV (CTV) has successfully impersonated more than 2 million people in over 30 countries so far during its run, defrauding more than 300 different brands out of their ad dollars.
The recently uncovered CTV operation — named ICEBUCKET by the researchers at White Ops that discovered it – was bent on tricking advertisers into thinking there were real people watching TV on the other side of the screen, when in reality, they were bots pretending to be real people watching TV. In other words, the sellers of the ad inventory were bot-herders; and, they received money in exchange for running the ads – but the ads didn’t actually reach any human eyeballs.
CTV is generally defined as the ability to watch internet-streamed services on the big screen via smart TVs, set-top devices such as Roku, TiVo and others, or via app integrations found within cable provider services. CTV has especially caught fire in the last few years, especially with premiere streaming services offering top-tier original content. While a large portion of CTV advertising remains static and akin to traditional TV ads (i.e., inserted ahead of time with little user-specific targeting), programmatic advertising is starting to come into its own.
Programmatic advertising involves brands serving up dynamic, highly targeted ads within these video streaming services in an automated way, to specific slivers of demographic profiles – which is just like how advertising works on the internet as a whole. Advertisers can spend between $10 and $20 per 1,000 video ad impressions (this is known as the cost per million, or CPM) for programmatic ads, which makes them more expensive than other ad types.
Read more: https://threatpost.com/icebucket-streami...rs/154852/
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