HUMAN

Playdigo Integrates HUMAN for Ad-Fraud Protection

Playdigo, a performance and programmatic advertising platform for mobile, CTV and cross-channel marketing, announced a partnership and technical integration with HUMAN Security to deploy HUMAN’s Ad Fraud Defense across Playdigo’s unified marketplace. The integration applies real-time pre-bid protections and post-bid validation to detect and prevent invalid and non-human traffic, creating a feedback loop to improve detection over time. Playdigo and HUMAN say the measures will strengthen campaign integrity, reduce wasted ad spend, and give demand partners greater confidence in verified, low-IVT inventory. The article includes statements from Playdigo CEO Daniel Ehevich and Lauren Irvin, VP Partner Development at HUMAN, emphasizing trust and transparency in programmatic campaigns.

Attribution Must Evolve as Consumer Behavior Fragments

Drive Social Media told MarTech Series that as consumers move across search, social, streaming, email, reviews and websites before buying, traditional last-click attribution no longer captures the full customer journey. The piece says marketers are increasingly adopting multi-touch attribution and customer-journey analytics to understand which channels create awareness, nurture consideration, and drive conversions. It also highlights that privacy regulation, reduced tracking, and third-party cookie changes are raising the importance of first-party data and cross-platform data connection. A Drive Social Media spokesperson emphasized that measurement must adapt to diverse, multi-step buying paths so businesses can allocate budgets more confidently and improve marketing efficiency.

Stealth Crawlers Face New Legal Scrutiny

Stealth crawlers are web crawlers that scrape publisher sites without identifying themselves or their purpose, often mimicking human browsing or bypassing robots.txt. Their prevalence is growing: Cloudflare reports more than half of web traffic is bot-based, and cybersecurity firm Human Security found AI scraper traffic surged in 2025. Publishers struggle to detect and attribute stealth crawler activity, complicating efforts to block or monetize scraped content. New York passed the Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act in June, and matching federal legislation was introduced in the U.S. House, requiring bots to disclose identity and purpose and enabling enforcement with civil penalties. Publishers and trade groups (including News/Media Alliance and publishers such as People Inc.) are adopting technical mitigations like expansive bot-block lists and advocating for legal remedies to recover value and deter bad actors.