As digital media becomes ever more sophisticated, so too, does the potential for advertising fraud, which can damage brands, public trust and fund criminal activities.
The UKSAFC is a collection of advertising professionals, policymakers, technology providers, and agencies, committed to tackling all forms of advertising funded crime and fraud in the United Kingdom.
And here its Spokesperson, Ian Moss outlines why the UK should build a global trusted ad exchange…
The digital advertising industry stands at a crossroads. Once celebrated for its precision targeting and data-driven efficiency, adtech has become mired in a growing crisis of trust.
Fraudulent impressions, bot traffic, and opaque exchanges now siphon billions from brands each year, fuelling criminal networks and undermining legitimate publishers.
Despite advances in programmatic buying and verification tools, the ecosystem remains riddled with inefficiency and deceit. In an era when transparency and accountability are demanded across all sectors, endemic ad fraud has become too large to ignore.
UKSAFC has been trying to galvanise the UK adtech industry around finding common solutions to the growth of fraud and fake impressions.
While there is almost universal acknowledgement of the problem, and despite ad fraud figures set to reach $170bn worldwide, there seems to be a general counsel of despair around seeking solutions, with no incentives on the current market-dominant platforms to reduce these numbers.
This is criminal activity that facilitates financing of illegal commerce, money laundering and the funding of extremism and hate.
The UK is a world leader in high quality publishing and in advertising. Supporting and protecting the UK’s journalistic and creative industry and its advertising industry needs to be considered in the round.
Recent research by the US advertising trade body, the Association of National Advertisers, shows that major brands continue to advertise across tens of thousands of sites and apps, many of which are low-quality, scraped, or AI-generated – a symptom of how open programmatic markets have turned attention into a commodity.
In this auction-driven system, high-quality editorial content is lumped together with questionable inventory, eroding its value and distorting the economics of responsible publishing.
The obsession with chasing audience segments and demographic profiles wherever the system claims they can be found leads brands to follow data signals rather than genuine readership from real humans, often ignoring the high levels of bot and invalid traffic that are easily able to manipulate a system that is neither properly designed nor incentivised to stop it (as everyone takes a cut of the costs per impression).
The result is a marketplace that rewards volume over integrity and dodgy eyeballs; and dodgy content over substance. It’s a genuine race to the bottom for quality journalism and credible media.
Brands should be seeking safer trading platforms, where they can be more confident that their money is being spent on legitimate publishing outlets that have proper editorial oversight, high standards of decency and trust and that are truthful outlets for news.
In return, legitimate publishers want to ensure that they are not competing for advertising revenue with an online market that encourages scam publishers and where fraudulent impressions are rife.
The problem is that there is no ad exchange on the market currently that will fit this bill.
The big players are content to keep taking their share of the money that is handed to and from criminal sources and defend themselves from regulation as if there is no alternative.
Radical proposition
A radical proposition is that the Government could, as part of its positioning as a tech hub, use the opportunity provided by this failure in the market, to support the creation of a globally pioneering ad exchange here in the UK.
One that is built on design principles of trusted participants, with high standards of brand safety and fraud detection.
The ease with which an alternative ad exchange could be seeded by the Government and grown in the commercial sector is a counter proposition to the ease in which current criminals have found the current ad tech system to plug into and use.
The Government can facilitate and seed it, but let it be built in the private sector and domiciled in the UK. UK publishers could be brought together to help populate a platform which would have full Know Your Customer obligations and a high barrier for entry to ensure legitimate publishers were served by it and that lawful advertisers were using it.
It could easily filter out those sites set up for the sole purpose of harvesting advertising revenues. Brands would benefit from higher-performing ad campaigns in the UK, with a much lower proportion of fraud and unwanted advertising inventory on ineffective sites.
The digital advertising system has created such complexity and lack of transparency that it makes it impossible for brands to manage costs of inefficient and unwarranted parts of the ad exchange ecosystem.
A new system could be tendered for financial start-up support from the Government, with a requirement to offer the highest possible standards of transparency, tracing of the placement of advertisements and verification that adverts are being viewed properly by human eyes instead of bots.
This proposal would remove the lack of transparency, make it clear where the money is going and will eliminate the inefficient and unwanted steps in the exchanges currently used, that take value from both brands and from publishers.
In a market where fraud is rife, ad exchanges are unregulated and ‘untransparent’, and there is no comfort for brands that their adverts are being seen by human eyes, or being kept away from sites that use hate, falsehoods and fake publishers.
The UK should be partnering in ways to drive efficiency, if they want to maintain themselves as a global player in a world where media and advertising is digital.
Helping set up a competitor to challenge the might of Google, Meta and Amazon could give the UK the ability to become a wider international challenger for revenues, a destination exchange that competes on quality of impressions and one that uses new techniques for agentic ways of buying media.
The UK could lead the way by establishing a competitor ad exchange. Used wisely, AI and agentic systems offer the UK a chance to reimagine programmatic advertising from the ground up. With the right framework – potentially including a publicly backed, transparent exchange to set new standards of accountability – the UK could set a global benchmark for how automation strengthens rather than corrodes quality media, and a market where brand value in the UK thrives by association.
This proposition is a different solution to regulation. It’s a market solution backed by investment and the convening power of government. But it could break the deadlock that we currently see in dealing with the increasing volume of fraud – and it would economically benefit all those involved in legitimate advertising online.
If the UK does not do this, someone else undoubtedly will.