AFFLE – RTN asia

Affle, which helps companies increase the effectiveness of their digital ads, said it received two more patents from the US, taking its total US patents to six. Patent 11157952 is using blockchain to create and store a list of fraud IPs and publishers to reduce scams in digital advertising. The technology creates an "immutable decentralized shared ledger" of fraudulent characteristics for publishers, scoring them into backlists & whitelists "through continual interactions verification based on smart contracts", the company said. The second one, patent 11151605, is related to a technology to detect ad fraud based on click-to-install behavior exhibited by the target. It uses trained machine learning models to detect human natural engagements vs non-human bot traffic and other real-time signals and patterns to minimise ad fraud. "These patent grants fortify our mobile ad fraud detection and prevention capabilities which include sophisticated machine learning algorithms to identify ad fraud in real-time, thereby maximizing quality of conversion-driven marketing for the advertisers," the company said. Digital marketing is the fastest growing segment within the advertising industry, and currently accounts for around 35% of all ad-spends. Though its share is smaller than that of television (around 45%), it is believed that it will overtake TV in the next 3 years or so. More often than not, digital marketing requires advertisers to pay more when the viewer clicks on the ad, or does some follow-up action, such as install an app or fill in a form. This makes digital advertising especially powerful, compared to non-interactive media like TV and radio. However, this has also led to the rise of an entire industry aimed at scamming advertisers by using software and hired employees to click on ads and do follow-up actions. Companies like Affle help advertisers monitor the response to their ads to check for fraud. Affle also helps companies increase the impact of ads by using algorithmic learning to figure out which types of ads are most effective and so on. The company then designs and deploys such ads on behalf of the customer on social networks like Instagram, Facebook, and via various ad networks such as Google's Ads. Commenting on the development, the company said ad fraud "remains one of the top industry concerns". "Our team has done extensive R&D to build robust and reliable algorithms to help detect, highlight and eliminate multiple types of ad fraud. "We have identified future usage of Blockchain technology as the trusted immutable platform for efficient sharing of insights amongst relevant stakeholders within the mobile marketing ecosystem to minimise mobile ad fraud in real-time. "This technology has many applications and use cases for the future especially in fraud with the proliferation of devices such as IoT devices growing exponentially,” the company said. Affle shares rose by around Rs 40 on the news of new patents today.

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Mobile ad firm Affle gets two more US patents