Are your digital ads reaching real people? Marc Dhalluin on ad fraud in SA marketing

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What this episode is about

Marc Dhalluin runs truthsets.online from Los Angeles, and he's spent years inside the mechanics of digital ad fraud — not as a theorist, but as someone who goes looking for where the money actually goes. The original promise of digital advertising was precision: unlike the "thumb-sucked" listener numbers of radio or the unverifiable circulation figures of print, the internet would tell you exactly who saw your message. Marc's argument is that it didn't deliver. There are more online ads bought and paid for every day than there are human beings on earth who could ever consume them — and the industry bodies that were supposed to police this published fraud rates of 1% until 2024.

This is a conversation about what's actually happening to your media budget, why the problem is bigger than most SA marketers realise, and what a forensic — rather than a reactive — approach to the numbers looks like in practice.

Three things we took away

• The scale is bigger than the industry admits. Marc has a simple test: there are more online ads bought and paid for each day than there are humans on earth who could ever see them. Industry body TAG published ad fraud at 1% until 2024 — a figure Marc disputes emphatically. Fraud isn't a rounding error. "Fraud is conscious," he says. "It means a criminal consciously games the system." The problem is structural, and it predates digital: magazine circulations were inflated, radio listener numbers were invented. Digital just gave the industry better tools to hide it.
• Digital never delivered the precision it promised. The pitch was that digital would replace guesswork with data. What it actually delivered, Marc argues, was "the ability to tell more stories with numbers." The shift to performance marketing — because performance channels gave us metrics — came at the cost of brand building. And if those performance metrics are built on fraudulent impressions, the entire strategy is optimising on a lie. Good marketing, he's blunt about this, is not all scientific. "A lot of good marketing is subjective."
• The fix is forensic, not reactive. The answer isn't to abandon digital or to punish every publisher in the plan. Marc's approach: take your wastage data to the publishers you trust, show them the numbers, and renegotiate. Build anti-fraud measures into every campaign at the start of the year, not as a patch after the fact. "Without a forensic approach, without going down to the smallest possible detail, we can't actually uncover place and cause." Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater — identify which inventory is clean, and protect it.

Our guest: Marc Dhalluin, Director at truthsets.online. Connect with Marc on LinkedIn.