---
title: "The invisible heist: Where does your media money really go?"
description: "Digital ad budgets leak to middlemen and bots: ad fraud and non-viewable programmatic inventory steal value, costing brands in South Africa and globally billions annually."
type: "NewsArticle"
publisher: "Daily Maverick"
site: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za"
section: "Sponsored Content"
author: "eatbigfish Africa"
author_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/author/eatbigfish-africa/"
canonical_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2026-09-01-the-invisible-heist-where-does-your-media-money-really-go/"
published: "2026-09-01T11:47:05"
updated: "2026-09-01T11:50:19"
lang: "en-ZA"
word_count: 1447
---

# The invisible heist: Where does your media money really go?

> Digital ad budgets leak to middlemen and bots: ad fraud and non-viewable programmatic inventory steal value, costing brands in South Africa and globally billions annually.

By eatbigfish Africa · Published 1 September 2026, 13:47 SAST · Updated 1 September 2026, 13:50 SAST

## Content

There are two very different problems hiding inside a digital media budget, and conflating them is where most advertisers go wrong. The first is that too little money reaches the people who actually make the content: expensive middlemen, aggressive margins and opaque supply chains that are unfair but, broadly, legal. The second is that a large share of that same budget pays for advertising that never had the chance of being seen by a human being, because the audience behind it was faked and / or the ad was never placed to be viewable, if at all. That isn't sharp business practice. That's theft, organised and largely invisible, and almost everyone in the chain benefits from it, whether they're in on it or not.

Hosted by David Blyth of eatbigfish Africa (represented by Delta Victor Bravo), in partnership with the Association for Communication & Advertising (ACA) and the Marketing Association of South Africa (MASA), the sixth and final session of Season 3 of the Daily Maverick Marketing Masterclass, put ad fraud under the microscope. The topic titled the “The Invisible Heist”, was discussed with guest experts Marc Dhalluin, Director at TruthSetsOnline, and Inge Hansen, Digital Director at PHD South Africa.

### Sizing the problem

The numbers set the scene. The global digital media market sits somewhere between $750 billion and $1 trillion this year, depending on the source. South Africa's share is far smaller, roughly R35 to R40 billion, which is around 70% of all measured ad spend in the country. Drawing on research from Juniper, ISBA, PwC and the ANA, Blyth highlighted that the global losses attributed to fraud specifically could reach US$170 billion by 2028, up from just under $100 billion in 2025, with some estimates suggesting that between 40% and 60% of programmatic ad budgets never reach a human audience at all.

### How the industry got here

Dhalluin traced the roots back to the rise of digital measurability itself. The ability to measure anything, coupled with the explosion of digital devices, brought marketing budgets flooding into the space and, critically, brought the C-suite along with it, because suddenly marketing results looked far more measurable. Measurement systems then failed to keep pace with two technological leaps: the arrival of programmatic trading around 2010 and the later explosion of mobile apps carrying advertising. Somewhere in that period, industry KPIs drifted from likes to traffic to clicks, all volume-based measures now widely dismissed as vanity metrics. An industry built on volume and price, Dhalluin argued, is exactly the environment criminals learned to exploit.

Hansen added two more pressures specific to today's market. The growing use of AI inside media platforms means agencies increasingly hand over optimisation decisions to algorithms without full visibility into where the resulting inventory lands. At the same time, generative AI is producing fake content sites that are convincing enough to mimic legitimate publishers and pull ad spend away from the local journalism that genuinely needs it. The latter problem is amplified by South African audiences' general reluctance to pay for content behind a paywall.

### The anatomy of fraud

Not every bot is a villain. Some perform useful functions, scraping analytics or processing transactions in the background. The fraud Blyth asked his guests to unpack falls into a handful of recognisable types: domain spoofing, where junk sites dress themselves up as reputable publishers; ad stacking, where ten ads are layered into a single slot and only one is ever visible; and pixel stuffing, where an ad is squeezed into an all-but-invisible pixel so that it technically “ran” without a person ever seeing it, and ads placed where no human could ever see them.

Dhalluin drew a sharper distinction between what happens before a campaign runs and what happens after. Pre-bid, an advertiser sets “declared variables” – the audience, placement and context it believes it's buying. It's precisely in that declared space that fraud operators pretend to be something they're not. Forensic analytics, by contrast, work only in the post-bid environment, measuring what actually happened once an ad went out to be rendered rather than what was planned. A mobile game loading hundreds of invisible ads behind the interface the player is engaging with is a case in point.

### Denial, comfort and no real incentive to fix it

Among large advertisers, Dhalluin said, fraud rarely comes up in conversation at all. Those who are aware of it typically believe existing tools and governance already cover them, only to be genuinely surprised at the scale of the issue once they look properly. The tools in wide use, Hansen agreed, are signal-based rather than forensic. They flag that something might be wrong without providing the granular detail needed to act on it, and different tools rarely even agree on definitions.

Underneath the denial sits a harder truth: almost nobody in the supply chain has an economic incentive to fix the problem. Every party is remunerated, in one way or another, on volume, regardless of whether a human being ever saw the ad. The brand paying the bill is the only one who doesn't benefit from letting this continue. As Dhalluin put it, the aim isn't to chase down criminals; it's to build a system where fraud simply stops paying.

### South Africa's exposure

Asked whether South Africa is a softer target because it's a smaller, less attractive market, Dhalluin was direct: no. Campaigns analysed in other markets of similar scale, South Korea among them, show the same fraud patterns and comparable levels of exposure. What differs locally is the mix in that South Africans consume a disproportionate amount of foreign-based media – this skews visibility into which publishers are genuinely benefiting from local ad spend. No large-scale, independent audit of the South African digital media market has been undertaken to date, beyond the private client work both guests do.

For brand managers without access to log-level data, Hansen's advice was practical: ask agencies for actual, not planned, domain-level placement reports, as assuming there is full transparency and therefore doing nothing is an unaffordable option. Unfamiliar domains suddenly carrying large volumes of impressions, high bounce rates, or ads reportedly served at three in the morning are all worth investigating. Moving toward a whitelist of trusted, verified inventory reduces exposure over time, but it isn't a set-and-forget exercise; sites need to be monitored continuously, because a trusted domain today can become a problem three months later.

### From volume to verified outcomes

If there's one lever that changes the underlying economics, both guests agreed it's shifting from cost-per-thousand-impressions towards a “human CPM” - paying for outcomes that were actually verified as reaching a real person, not simply served. That shift isn't instant. Optimising away from fraud and low-quality inventory costs more in the short term, and clients and agencies need to agree upfront on what the KPIs will become before the change is made, not after. Moving a portion of spend to direct publisher bookings or programmatic guaranteed deals was raised as one of the quicker wins, since it offers far more certainty on exactly where ads are landing and what inventory is guaranteed.

### What Monday morning looks like

Closing the session, and the season, both guests kept their advice practical. Dhalluin's suggestion for CMOs: run a benchmark trial without changing anything first, simply to establish what's actually happening against what dashboards currently report, and turn off any audience extension features running on existing campaigns, which on its own can meaningfully cut exposure to fraud. Hansen's closing point was about the relationship underpinning all of it - genuine progress depends on client and agency collaborating openly rather than assigning blame, and on both sides agreeing that a cheap buy is rarely a sound one.

Dhalluin didn't pretend AI makes this easier in the short term; if anything, it's accelerating the problem, powering new fake sites and apps faster than tools can catch them. But he was equally clear that the fix is not out of reach. What South Africa does on its own will only ever be a small dent, but added to a critical mass of advertisers demanding the same thing everywhere else, the numbers start to move. Blyth closed the season on that note: an uncomfortable conversation, deliberately so, because ignoring it is what let the problem grow this large in the first place. **DM**

**About the series**

This was the sixth and final session of “We're Picking Fights”, Season 3 of the Daily Maverick Marketing Masterclass, hosted by eatbigfish Africa (represented by Delta Victor Bravo) in partnership with the Association for Communication & Advertising (ACA) and the Marketing Association of South Africa (MASA). Six fault lines, one platform for tough debate. To view the series, visit Daily Maverick Events.