Marketers obsess over click fraud while a bigger problem hides in plain sight — and the platforms profiting from it have little reason to fix it.
The advertising industry has spent years building tools to catch bots and block fraudulent clicks. Nick Morley thinks the industry has been solving the wrong problem.
Morley scaled IAS’s EMEA business from $18 million to $90 million, selling ad verification, watching the rise of walled gardens and black-box automated campaigns up close, and recently moved from Chairman to CEO of Lunio within eight months — a shift he describes not as ambition, but as urgency. His argument is straightforward and uncomfortable: the conversation about click fraud has been too narrow, the waste is bigger than anyone admits, and AI is now automating that waste at a speed nobody can audit fast enough to catch.
In this conversation, Morley breaks down what he calls waste intelligence, why platforms that profit from invalid traffic have little incentive to fix it, and why he believes agencies, not platforms, will be the ones to finally force the industry to clean up its data.
Full interview;
Lunio says the internet is full of fake clicks, traffic, and leads. So, how much of every dollar spent on digital advertising is being stolen?
Our data shows that, on average, over 8.5% of ad clicks are invalid, translating to an estimated $71 billion in wasted ad spend globally. But looking at it purely as “stolen” dollars is only half the story. The true cost to a business is significantly higher when you factor in the missed revenue opportunities from that misallocated budget. For example, if a company spends $1 million with a 3:1 return on ad spend (ROAS), a 5% invalid traffic rate doesn’t just mean $50,000 wasted — it also means $150,000 in missed revenue. That is the real impact we are fixing.
You scaled IAS EMEA from $18M to $90M, selling ad verification. Did the industry get cleaner, or just better at pretending it had?
The industry didn’t just pretend; we genuinely made massive strides in solving legacy issues like viewability and brand safety for display and programmatic. But the battlefield shifted. Today, performance marketing relies heavily on walled gardens, social platforms, and black box automated campaigns like Google PMax. In these environments, marketers have lost a lot of their control and transparency. The bad actors simply evolved from basic botnets to highly sophisticated invalid traffic that mimics human behavior.
To combat this, you can’t rely on legacy methods. That’s why Lunio’s approach is vastly different. We have a robust data science team, well above industry standards, building superior algorithms to detect and prevent this evolved waste in real time.
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You’ve said the obsession with click fraud is missing the bigger picture — so what is the real problem that the entire adtech industry is collectively choosing not to talk about?
The term click fraud implies a purely malicious, security-based problem. The bigger issue is waste intelligence. We’re talking about algorithmic inefficiencies, benign scrapers, and poor targeting, all of which drain performance budgets. The industry has historically championed the practitioner, but as ad networks push opaque, automated solutions, practitioners are losing their voice and visibility. We need to focus on cleaning up the data and giving marketers back their control across all their verticals, rather than just playing whack-a-mole with hackers.
Marketers are deploying AI to optimize campaigns at scale. If the underlying traffic data is compromised, aren’t they just automating bad decisions faster?
Absolutely. If you feed garbage into an AI optimization engine, you get garbage out, but at unprecedented speed. AI algorithms are designed to find patterns. If an AI sees a cluster of fake clicks or lead forms and attributes them to a conversion event, it will automatically optimize your budget to go find more of that exact same fake traffic. The algorithms themselves aren’t flawed, but their baseline data is corrupted. That’s why we are aggressively building out broader capabilities across Meta and LinkedIn, and adding brand safety for PMax. You have to clean the underlying data pool before you let AI take the wheel.
You went from Chairman to CEO at Lunio within eight months. What did you see from the board seat that made you decide the job needed to be done differently and by you?
Our founder, Neil Andrew, built an incredible foundation, and as he stepped back to focus on product vision, it gave me the opportunity to step in and accelerate our next phase. With over 25 years of martech and Go-To-Market experience, including scaling Efficient Frontier, Adobe, and IAS, I recognized that Lunio needed to aggressively expand its product and markets. Specifically, we have a massive opportunity to grow our already significant US client base, given the enormous market size, and I’m personally dedicating much of my time and travel to it.
We are looking to aggressively grow our market awareness and market share, and stepping into the CEO role has allowed me to execute that GTM strategy directly.
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If waste intelligence is the real crisis in advertising, why are the holding companies, the platforms, and the brands not screaming about it? Who benefits from the silence?
It comes down to misaligned incentives. The ad platforms fundamentally benefit from volume; every click generates revenue for them, whether it’s from a genuine prospect or a sophisticated bot.Â
For agencies, there’s historically been a hesitation to highlight inefficiencies to clients. However, that dynamic has shifted over time, and agencies are now incredibly vigilant. We see significant opportunities to grow with agencies and have proactively built our team with specialized sales and service leaders with deep agency and partnership experience from companies like IAS, DoubleVerify, and Publicis. We operate a flexible, customer-friendly commercial model that works well for agencies and brands. Ultimately, the smartest agencies realize that partnering with us to eliminate waste is a massive competitive advantage, which builds the trust required for long-term agency and brand relationships.
