Are Marketers Buying Growth, or the Illusion of It, Through Online Advertising?

For more than a decade, marketers have been told that digital advertising’s greatest advantage is scale. Programmatic technology promised access to millions of websites, billions of impressions and the ability to reach consumers anywhere across the internet.

Yet actual business results tell a more complicated story.

First-hand accounts from marketers who have invested heavily in digital channels help illuminate the impacts seen on business outcomes:

• Adidas admitted that a focus on efficiency rather than effectiveness led them to over-focus on ROI and over-invest in performance and digital at the expense of brand building.
• Airbnb cut back on performance marketing and still reached 95% of their digital traffic from the year prior.
• eBay paused all paid search spend in the western U.S. and saw no impact on their site visits and sales.
• JPMorgan Chase reduced the number of websites serving its programmatic ads from roughly 400,000 sites to just 5,000 and saw very little change in the visibility of their ads.
• P&G cut $200 million in digital ad spend and said it did not see a reduction in sales growth, indicating a meaningful portion of that digital spend had been ineffective.

These findings from brands themselves raise a fundamental question for marketers: how much of the internet’s advertising supply actually exists AND makes an impact?

Also Read: Offline Attribution: Why It’s the Game-Changer for Retailers

The Illusion of Online Scale

VAB’s recently released marketer’s guide, The Illusions of the Internet, examines this problem directly, identifying 20 realities that reveal how much of today’s internet is shaped by fake activity, opaque supply chains and misleading signals of scale.

One of the realities illuminated that more than half of internet traffic is generated by non-human sources, a large portion of which includes malicious “bad bots” that scrape data, manipulate impressions or commit fraud.

A VAB analysis uncovered the problem of bots on Facebook where the number of fake accounts banned annually is equivalent to over half the world’s population.

The online programmatic supply chain itself adds another layer of complexity. Automated buying systems route ads through exchanges, networks and intermediaries that frequently obscure where campaigns actually run. Ad placements are often grouped into vague categories like “audience networks” or “other,” making it difficult for marketers to understand exactly where their budgets are going and what kind of content they’re aligning with.

In other words, marketers are frequently paying for presumed scale without fully understanding what it really represents.

The Cost of Invisible Waste

Digital ad fraud is estimated to cost marketers more than $100 billion annually, fueled by tactics such as fake clicks and fabricated audiences.

Beyond outright fraud, advertising waste also stems from inventory that technically exists but delivers little to no value. Estimates suggest that about 26% of programmatic digital ad spend lands on unproductive placements, including non-viewable ads and “made-for-advertising” sites created primarily to generate ad revenue rather than provide meaningful content.

Viewed through this lens, JPMorgan Chase’s experiment of cutting down the number of websites they advertised on by 99% and finding the same outcomes becomes easier to understand. If a large share of digital inventory is low on quality, redundant or fraudulent, removing hundreds of thousands of websites may simply eliminate waste rather than reduce meaningful reach.

The Internet’s Growing Authenticity Problem

Across the digital ecosystem, authenticity is becoming harder to guarantee. Social platforms and online marketplaces have seen a surge in scams, counterfeit goods and misleading advertisements. Research shows that nearly three-quarters of American adults report have experienced some form of online scam or attack.

At the same time, generative AI has accelerated the spread of low-quality, mass-produced material often referred to as “AI slop,” which is content created primarily to generate traffic and advertising revenue rather than provide real value to audiences.

A VAB analysis of YouTube found that over 33 million videos were removed from the platform over the last six years for being classified as spam, scams and other misleading content. The large number of videos that are eventually removed highlights the breadth and depth of these issues plaguing the internet today.

Not only is the internet being overrun by deceptive content that advertisers may unwittingly be advertising in, but there is also a pervasive issue with piracy and illegal streaming that is estimated to cost $30 Billion each year, impacting content producers and costing the United States an estimated 250,000 jobs.

The same issues plaguing online advertising also affect consumers. When ads appear alongside scam products, deceptive content or fraudulent activity, they can unintentionally expose consumers to risky environments and erode trust in both the platform and the brands advertising there.

The Implication for Marketers

None of this means digital advertising lacks value, but the industry’s long-standing assumption that more inventory automatically leads to better outcomes is increasingly being challenged.

Instead, marketers are rediscovering a tried-and-true principle: the quality of the environment matters.

Nothing illustrates this more than multiscreen TV platforms, which offer trust, transparency, accountability and real human audiences at scale. These platforms collectively invest more than $100 billion annually in professionally produced content, creating advertiser-friendly spaces where brands can connect with highly engaged viewers.

Consumers recognize the difference as well, which is quantified by findings from VAB’s The Power of Premium Video report. Our research shows that three-quarters of adults say they love watching TV and streaming content, while TV is also the most trusted media platform among consumers.

With the internet increasingly defined by illusions of scale, marketers need to focus on what actually drives results. And since not all impressions are created equal, growth is more likely to come from trusted media environments with real human audiences than from chasing potentially dubious impressions across the endless long tail of the web.