Bidstack, a provider of native in-game advertising, and Moat by Oracle have taken on the challenge of ridding in-game ads of fraud.

On Friday the companies shared performance and verified general invalid traffic (GIVT) data from a campaign featured in the video game “Football Manager 21.” The campaign, which ran in the United Kingdom, is by Dentsu’s DGame on behalf of a leading global financial institution. 

Dentsu UK & Ireland in November 2020 launched DGame, a division to deliver solutions to help brands reach and engage with gamers.

Preliminary analysis showed Bidstack’s overall PC GIVT performed about 3.5 times better compared with Moat’s Global Q3 2020 Display benchmarks of 2.9% GIVT, with more than 99% of observed impressions verified as GIVT free.

GIVT stems from invalid, malicious or fraudulent activity that generates illegitimate ad impressions. Brands must have the ability to verify whether their ads are delivered to a real person when running in-game advertising, said Mark Kopera, head of product for Moat by Oracle.

As programmatic grows, the ad budget waste caused by fraud continues to rise. Data from eMarketer and Juniper Research puts the estimated lost to ad fraud in 2023 at $100 billion, up from $42 billion in 2019.

Today’s announcement is a key milestone in Bidstack’s commitment to create the most trustworthy in-game platform for brands, advertisers and game developers, the companies said.

In 2019, Bidstack acquired Pubguard to protect its gaming inventory by removing fraudulent ads and help give advertisers a brand safe environment to run campaigns. The technology was integrated into Bidstack’s software development kit.