The Inventory Fraud Project

About Our Project

The Inventory Fraud Project is developed by a team of researchers at UC Davis. The goal of this project is to shed new light on the journey of an ad across the digital advertising supply chain. Our study is focused around adexchange-prohibited inventory that obtain digital advertising and the entities involved in routing the ads to these websites. This enables us to study the compliance of adtech standards and detect inventory misrepresentation-based fraudulent instances. As part of our research, we plan to measure and inform affected buyers and sellers (where appropriate) in order to reduce ad inventory fraud within the ad-tech ecosystem.

Who's involved? Why is it exciting to contribute and be a part of our research?

Buyers


Buyers (or advertisers) are the key stakeholder in this project. For advertisers, the digital advertising ecosystem represents both an enormous opportunity for growth as well as a significant business risk when ad placements are served in inappropriate or unsafe media environments.
We are seeking to understand internal challenges and technical limitations that buyers face as they engage vendors in their digital advertising initiatives. Advertiser participation in our study will allow us to include buyer-side perspective in our research and enable advertisers to identify mechanisms to protect their ad spend.




Sellers


Ad exchanges, ad networks and publishers are all part of the supply chain we seek to study as part of this project. As the supply chain has grown to include more intermediaries and players, the journey that ad takes to its final destination has become more complicated to uncover.
Our goal is to create awareness for sellers around unknown instances of fraud taking place among their partner networks. We believe that engaging the seller-side perspective in our research will enable them to improve vetting standards and better serve advertiser needs.