I worked for this industry some time ago, and, to my knowledge, you would be right to assume that "95%+ of Adtech Companies Are Full Of Shit".<p>Even in big Corporations like Criteo, someone will occasionally omit a portion of samples during testing, tweak slightly output results, or flat out invent numbers from the bottom of their heart in order to please clients and to give them an illusion of something that works.
Another interesting discussion [1] about the notorious VPAID that so many people here were outraged about.<p>Turns out, HN is full of it too.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/4o0v2b/the_cancer_of_the_advertising_world_that_nobody/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/4o0v2b/the_cancer_of...</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11900453" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11900453</a>
As someone who is working on an attribution platform, I'm always amazed at how few marketers use real performance measuring tools (like attribution modeling).<p>Fraud should be irrelevant (well, a network problem) if you're measuring against your actual returns. It's the immaturity of the industry (brands especially) that allow fraud to be rampant and sometimes network-sponsored.