basic "due diligence" is what is needed to see the fraud and do something about it

How To Find Bot Traffic With Google Analytics

Can you find fraudulent bot traffic with Google Analytics alone? Yes, here's how.

less than 50% of an advertiser's dollar goes to "working media" (showing digital ads) when they buy through the long, complex, and non-transparent programmatic supply chain

How Much Of Your Dollar Goes To Working Media In Digital?“

Working media” was used to describe the portion of every ad dollar that went to showing ads, instead of to “non-working media” costs such as agency fees, etc. What are the ratios in digital?

that's not even taking into account how crappy targeting is (because it's all derived data)

How Accurate Is Programmatic Ad Targeting?

Many marketers still subscribe to the “more is better” philosophy of marketing. Do you?

or the activity of bots (bots pretending to be any audience segment you want to target)

Bots Emulate Any Audience You Want To Target—Here’s How

The simplest bots are made from headless browsers, spun up in cloud data centers. Even these bots can pretend to be any audience segment you want to target. Here's how they do it.