- pDOOH reduces ad fraud by eliminating bot traffic and fake impressions through real-world screen delivery.
- Audience inflation is the real risk, making transparent, standardised measurement essential.
- Demand verification by asking how audiences are measured, validated and independently audited.
- Independent verification builds trust, ensuring campaigns run where, when and to whom advertisers expect.
- Transparency will drive pDOOH growth, with standardised measurement becoming the foundation of advertiser confidence. *
With ad fraud continuing to drain marketing budgets, South African brands need to know exactly how audiences are measured and verified in the programmatic DOOH space
Every advertiser wants the same thing: to know that the audience they paid for is the audience they received. It sounds straightforward enough, yet we’re seeing money flow to invalid, fraudulent or made-for-advertising websites, skewing the numbers and delivering little to no value to advertisers.
In many cases, fraudulent inventory is presented as legitimate, diverting ad spend away from genuine audiences and into environments that generate no meaningful return.
While there is no consensus on exactly how much money is lost to ad fraud in South Africa, there is little doubt that the figure is substantial. If marketers want to continue investing in digital channels, they cannot afford to take inventory and traffic at face value.
pDOOH operates differently
The good news is that programmatic digital out of home (pDOOH) operates differently to many other programmatic channels. There are no bots walking past our screens in Rivonia Road. Our medium exists in the real world.
This physical presence removes many of the challenges associated with invalid traffic and creates a far more transparent environment for advertisers. The supply chain is also thinner, with fewer publishers involved than in many traditional online channels.
But that does not mean pDOOH is immune from scrutiny. The biggest risk in pDOOH is not bots or fake impressions. It is audience inflation driven by inconsistent measurement methodologies.
Currently, publishers are responsible for ingesting data into networks to determine how many people are exposed to each ad play.
There is no standardised approach for how the industry uses the tools available to calculate those audience figures, meaning unscrupulous or naive publishers can potentially use non-standard or biased data to inflate audience sizes and increase revenue per programmatic ad play.
Ask the questions
The answer for advertisers is to push for complete transparency. Ask straightforward questions: how are audience numbers calculated? Where does the data come from? How is audience verification conducted?
Advertisers should be able to see the inventory they are buying and credible publishers should be able to show exactly where their screens are. Ask what third-party verification systems they support and which industry organisations endorse them. If publishers are cagey with their answers, that’s a red flag.
At Polygon, we have built our approach around transparency. We believe pDOOH should be a glass box (not an opaque or black one), where everyone can understand how the systems work and what algorithms are driving them.
We follow the audience verification methodology prescribed by the World Out of Home Organization and will make our audience verification process publicly available next month with the launch of our new website.
Anyone in the industry will be able to review it and see exactly how we arrive at our audience figures. As a Google Partner and IAB member, we’re also required to meet strict industry standards, giving advertisers an additional layer of assurance.
Independent verification
In addition, we’ve introduced independent verification into our ecosystem through our partnership with Seedooh, making Polygon the first programmatically verifiable business in South Africa.
Through the platform, advertisers can verify where and when their campaigns appeared and how many people were exposed to them.
We provide detailed reporting and proof of flighting for most campaigns we run, including photographs of campaigns as they appear on screen.
The industry is moving towards greater transparency and standardisation, and that can only be a good thing. Transparency should not be a competitive advantage for a handful of publishers. It should be standard.
I expect to see more independent verification systems, greater consistency in how audience figures are calculated and deeper involvement from major demand-side platforms as pDOOH continues to mature.
The future of the channel depends on creating an environment that is both frictionless to buy and easy to verify. Ultimately, advertisers should never have to take audience numbers on faith.
If a number cannot be explained, it shouldn’t be trusted.
* Summary created by AI.
With over 16 years of experience in the digital-out-of-home (DOOH) industry, Remi du Preez is passionate about creating a more inclusive, transparent, and accountable programmatic ecosystem in South Africa and beyond. As the founder and managing director of Polygon, he leads a team of experts who are dedicated to connecting and unifying DOOH networks across the continent, creating new revenue opportunities for the OOH industry to reach and engage audiences with relevant and impactful messages.
