The World Federation of Advertisers puts global ad fraud losses at up to $150 billion annually. This has massive repercussions for digital advertisers who are seeing spend intended to reach real customers siphoned away. It’s become a particular issue for CTV. It’s a structural problem, but most media plans still respond to it with a single, generic filter applied after the damage is already done.
The result is predictable: budgets that look clean on paper, performance signals you can’t trust, and even more spending just to understand why things aren’t working. Bot fraud is more than a waste of money; it corrupts the data you rely on to make better decisions next time.
Why CTV Is Now the Primary Target
It’s a tried-and-true pattern that has repeated itself across every channel since the dawn of digital advertising: fraud is attracted to growth. CVT is a hot target for bot fraud precisely because adoption has surged. Fraudsters built out their infrastructure as the channel scales to exploit the same programmatic pipes that make CTV so attractive to advertisers in the first place.
They do this through Invalid Traffic (IVT), which includes URL spoofing, robotic clicking, device-level impersonation, and app-level fraud specific to a CTV. Each type generates fake impressions, distorts completion rates, and hands you a performance report that has nothing to do with the actual human being watching your ad.
How Resonate Managed Service Builds the Defense
Effective protection against bot fraud has to happen in stages and across the full delivery chain, not simply in a campaign-level filter. At Resonate Managed Service, we build fraud defense into three layers, each targeting a different point in the delivery process:
- Layer 1: Human-centric targeting — This begins before a single bid is even placed. Our media team builds campaigns around Resonate’s predictive consumer intelligence, targeting real people based on psychographic depth and behavioral signals. When you start with verified human audiences, you cut the share of impressions that ever have a chance to land in bot territory. It’s the cleanest filter available, and it requires both data and expertise to build campaigns around it properly.
- Layer 2: Pre-bid verification — Our campaigns integrate DoubleVerify and IAS at the highest available filter settings as the default. We also run fraud detection inside our bidder, analyzing IP addresses, user agents, and click patterns to identify and block suspicious traffic before we spend on it.
- Layer 3: Supply-side incident response — We work with Supply Side Partners (SSPs) to perform real-time blocking of spoofed and fraudulent inventory. Much of this happens before we even have the opportunity to bid, but when something surfaces mid-flight, our team pulls site reports, blocks sources, and alerts DSP and SSP partners.
The Governance That Holds It Together
We maintain a quarterly updated, third-party-verified allow list of premium publishers alongside a global deny list that expands the moment anomalies appear. We target the industry benchmark for invalid traffic of under 5%.
For CTV specifically, inventory passes through third-party ad verification, bot detection, and cybersecurity firms before it ever reaches our campaigns. Three layers of protection and a governance structure to make it work require a team of people that know what they’re looking at and move quickly when something is off. It’s not necessarily something every advertising team has the in-house capability to execute.
The Outcomes of Better Bot Fraud Protection
Resonate Managed Service for bot fraud ensure three things:
- Your budget goes toward real people because we target them from the start
- Your performance signals are trustworthy because we’re not mixing bot data into the baseline
- When something unusual shows up, you hear about it before it compounds
Fraud protection should be more than just a feature; to get it right requires an actively managed discipline, with a team that owns it. That’s the difference between hoping for the best and actually protecting your budget and the integrity of your results.
Ready to make your next campaign bot-resistant and performance ready? Talk with a data expert on our Managed Service team today.
