Mobile ad network shares results of international competition to ensure quality of its ad traffic

London 26 March 2013 BuzzCity, the global mobile advertising network, is today announcing findings which will help combat the on-going issue of click fraud in the mobile advertising industry, following a series of joint initiatives with some of the world’s leading universities.

The findings are the result of partnerships between BuzzCity, the Singapore Management University (SMU) and the National University of Singapore (NUS).  BuzzCity collaboratively hosted a Fraud Detection in Mobile Advertising (FDMA) event with SMU in September 2012 and  a BuzzCity-SOC Clicks Fraud Detection Challenge 2012 with NUS in August 2012. These studies provided a platform for researchers to analyse data patterns to help identify the many different ways that fraudulent activity mimics human clicking activity, thereby helping to increase the effectiveness of click fraud detection and fraudulent publishers.

Dr KF Lai, CEO of BuzzCity commented; “Click fraud effectively enables fraudsters to make a small sum of money from each fraudulent click, which can add up to quite a large sum of money if done enough times. The results of this study are critical to maintaining the integrity of the performance of mobile advertising campaigns for the industry as a whole.  It will not only help to prevent this kind of illegal activity, but it is also about improving our accountability to advertisers, and that advertisers using mobile advertising networks can be confident of their quality”.

As m-commerce continues to gain momentum and more brands are turning to mobile advertising, the dominant CPC (cost per click) advertising model can be subject to fraudulent clicks – when site owners generate clicks on ads that appear on their own site to boost their earnings. Click fraud seriously diminishes the efficiency of a campaign as well as damaging the user experience – with promotional messages becoming unreliable and misleading.

Fraud detection is challenging for many data mining and machine learning algorithms because it involves many variables in a ‘highly imbalanced distribution’ ie fraudsters may be a small fraction of all the clicks.

Dr KF Lai, CEO of BuzzCity, is concurrently an adjunct associate professor in the National University of Singapore. The partnership ensures BuzzCity’s access to top research and helps to cement the company’s on-going leadership in the field. As a result, only publishers of the highest quality are recruited and retained in the BuzzCity Ad Network, ensuring top performance for advertisers and publishers.

The full results of the FDMA competition were published in the Journal of Machine Learning Research published in January 2013.
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Note to editors:

The first Fraud Detection Challenge was run in August 2012 in partnership with National University of Singapore and was open to students in the School of Computing.

The Fraud Detection in Mobile Advertising (FDMA) competition was second in the series of challenges. It ran from 1st September until 30th September 2012 with 127 international teams from 20 countries. Data patterns studied included publisher ID, campaign ID, handset, IP address and time of clicking. Findings of the competition are currently being incorporated into BuzzCity’s global mobile advertising network, adding to its existing risk management strategies against click fraud.

The winners of FDMA in September 2012 were teams affiliated to:

1.    Data Analytics Department Institute of Infocomm Research, Singapore
2.    Masdar Institute of Science & Technology, UAE
3.    School of Computing, National University of Singapore
4.    Graduate School of Science & Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan

For more information please contact:
Siobhan Eyres, Rachel Bell or  Sian Gaskell at CubanEight
Tel: 01869 238089
Email: [email protected]

About BuzzCity

BuzzCity is a mobile advertising network that offers brand owners and agencies access to a global display network of publishers. As a leading international player, BuzzCity has developed in-depth knowledge of the mobile consumer and provides marketers with clear opportunities to reach this audience via its advertising and publisher programmes. The network also offers opportunities for publishers, developers and owners of mobile media properties to monetise their traffic through mobile internet advertising.

Additional information can be found at www.buzzcity.com.