Spotlight
Welcome to the latest edition of Spotlight, your monthly recap of the biggest stories in adtech and digital marketing.
What we have for you today: The challenges of CTV ad fraud, increasing regulatory scrutiny in the US, and renewed buzz around adtech startups.
At the end of June, DoubleVerify revealed the existence of “ShadowBot,” a fraudulent bot scheme that generated over 35 million spoofed mobile devices in Q1 2025 alone. According to the company, ShadowBot was responsible for siphoning off $2.5 million since the start of the year from advertisers as well as CTV publishers and platforms.
As the CTV advertising market gathers pace, we can expect fraudsters to double down on their nefarious schemes. Putting in place robust verification processes are vital to help advertisers and publishers combat this scourge and ensure that real people and the correct audiences are seeing their campaigns. Tools like telco-verified IDs, where audiences are 100% verified at source, will be key.
When the current administration came to power, there was speculation that there would be much more of a laissez faire approach to the regulatory oversight of businesses. Developments over the course of the past month suggest that the opposite is the case, with state and federal regulators focusing in on privacy laws.
For instance, under its Chair Andrew Ferguson, the FTC is being more active than expected around privacy issues, particularly the protection of children’s privacy.
Meanwhile, on a state level, a digital media company focused on the health and wellness sector became the recipient of the largest fine to date under California’s CCPA – a whopping $1.55 million levied for ignoring consumer opt-out requests for targeted advertising, not giving clear disclosures about its data sharing practices and sharing health information with third parties without getting proper consent.
And it’s not just Democrat states getting in on the action. In the Republican stronghold of Texas, the Consumer Protection Division of the Texas attorney general’s office is proving highly efficacious in enforcing the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act (TDPSA) and has established a well-resourced enforcement operation.
The message is clear: businesses cannot expect an easy ride when it comes to privacy regulations and should act accordingly.
Startups are once again generating buzz in the adtech space. Integral Ad Science is rumoured to be entertaining suggestions of splitting from Publica, and there’s also speculation that Criteo is considering a potential divestiture of its BidSwitch assets. Elsewhere, larger adtech businesses are looking to startup investments to future-proof their strategies.
Significantly in light of Google’s cookie U-Turn, we’re seeing some of this startup innovation focusing in on cookieless solutions. A UK-based early-stage startup called Paapi, for example, is building a platform to help advertisers with privacy-safe ad measurement, albeit by largely using probabilistic data (consented deterministic data is used when available).
The future is clearly cookieless and we welcome this innovation in measurement, an area that Novatiq itself is developing some exciting plans around – watch this space.
A recent article from Digiday summarises some of the major misperceptions around AI content scraping of publishers’ sites and outlines the difference between once-and-done scraping to train models and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) bots that are for real-time outputs. The article also looks at how publishers can monetise RAG scraping by charging bots for crawling their sites.
Clearly, publishers will need to be recompensed in some way for the use of their data. This could also be achieved by providing access to the advertising slots that sit alongside AI outputs, or by providing a link back to the publisher’s site.
There will also need to be clear consent mechanisms in place where the content being scraped contains personal data – after all, users may give consent for a publisher to use their data, but this consent will not automatically cover use by third-party bots.
Data out this month reveals a return to the norm for how publishers’ revenue is distributed between digital and traditional channels, with the proportion of publishers who get their revenue entirely from traditional channels or entirely from digital channels remaining steady, along with the percentage of publishers who rely equally on both traditional and digital revenue sources.
This speaks to a resilient digital marketing sector. Despite the tumult of recent years, particularly around Google’s shifting position on cookies, advertisers are maintaining their spend, and digital remains a vital revenue source for publishers.
If you’re a publisher looking for more information on how best to monetise your data in a privacy-preserving manner, then check out our latest white paper.
As always, you can also read more by visiting our blog. This month, we’re looking at how telcos can help beat digital ad fraud – and make money in the process.
Telcos are looking for greater revenue streams than their current models provide. Could a smart digital strategy, providing telco-verified ID solutions at scale for publishers and brands, be the answer?
Download your free guide to find out why digital identity could be a lucrative new opportunity.
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