Adjust hires Ville Mikkola as Head of CAAF

Adjust announced a new senior hire to spearhead its Coalition Against Ad Fraud (CAAF). Ville Mikkola joins as Head of CAAF, the industry-wide alliance founded by Adjust to tackle ad fraud. 

Ad fraud stands as one of the biggest threats to marketing success, having claimed an estimated $42 billion of ad dollars in 2019. Founded by Adjust in 2017, CAAF is a coalition of industry partners that actively fight fraud by driving education within the sector. Moving away from opinions to facts, members agree on shared definitions and guidelines that include: establishing what constitutes technical performance fraud in alignment with IAB measurement guidelines, committing to latency guidelines, and agreeing on responsibilities on dealing with the issue.

“With mobile ad spend continuing to break records, performance ad fraud is a problem that advertisers and networks can no longer afford to ignore. Our network of trusted partners plays an integral role in providing accurate, actionable and fraud-free data for our clients. We’re thrilled to welcome Ville to the team, and look forward to working with him to move our CAAF mission forward,” commented Paul H. Müller, co-founder, and CTO of Adjust.

CAAF now counts 30 members, including leading advertising networks such as ironSource, Liftoff, TapJoy, CrossInstall, Vungle, Moloco, Jampp, AdColony, and Fyber. 

Based out of Adjust’s Berlin headquarters, Mikkola will be responsible for the strategy and global development of CAAF. Mikkola has a long history and involvement in ad fraud prevention, through his experiences at both advertising technology companies and later through his own company. Prior to Adjust, he served as Director of Network Operations at adtech firm Glispa, and as Managing Director for Europe at mobile advertising network YeahMobi. Most recently, Mikkola co-founded a casual gaming company, TreasureHunt, which worked with NBCUniversal and was recently acquired by Huuuge Games.