South Africa, March 10 -- One of the ongoing challenges within that complexity is how much of our digital investment actually reaches real people.

As digital advertising has grown, so too has the infrastructure that supports it. Programmatic trading, automated optimisation and sophisticated targeting have created enormous opportunities for marketers.

At the same time, the scale and automation of the system means that issues such as invalid traffic, brand safety and ad fraud have become part of the global industry conversation.

Not all invalid traffic is malicious. Some of it is simply the result of automated systems such as search crawlers. However, there are also instances where bad actors deliberately exploit the system through bot a...