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What if 90% of your marketing budget is being stolen right in front of your eyes? In this eye-opening conversation, Dr. Augustine Fou—MIT PhD and leading expert in digital ad fraud—reveals the shocking truth about how bots are quietly draining millions from marketing budgets, including those in B2B tech.
Having worked in digital advertising since the mid-90s, Dr. Fou explains how programmatic advertising created the perfect storm for fraud to flourish. Bad actors create thousands of websites with plagiarized or AI-generated content, purchase bot traffic, and sell ad impressions to advertisers at a profit. The fraud takes many forms: fake impressions, fraudulent clicks, form-filling bots that generate leads, and even attribution manipulation that makes ineffective channels look successful.
Most alarming for tech marketers is learning that performance-based campaigns aren't immune. "The bots will do exactly what you pay for," explains Dr. Fou. If you're paying for leads, sophisticated bots will complete your forms and solve CAPTCHAs, leaving you with seemingly legitimate but worthless leads. Even worse, traditional metrics like viewability and attention are easily manipulated by fraudsters.
Dr. Fou introduces a powerful alternative metric: "attentiveness," which measures actual human interaction after someone clicks through to your landing page. Unlike easily faked metrics, attentiveness captures real engagement through mouse movements, scrolling, and clicking—behaviors that bots typically don't replicate convincingly.
The conversation offers practical advice for protecting your budget: watch for suspiciously high click-through rates, monitor for leads completed in humanly impossible timeframes, and add invisible form fields that only bots will complete. The potential upside is enormous—companies could save up to 90% of their digital ad budgets by eliminating fraudulent spend.
Ready to stop throwing money at bots? Follow Dr. Augustine Fou on LinkedIn where he's published over 800 articles on digital ad fraud or at his company, Fou Analytics.

🎧 Tech Marketing Rewired is hosted by Kevin Kerner, founder of Mighty & True.

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