The menace of Ad Fraud in India
According to Moneka Khurana, country head for the Mobile Marketing Association in India, ad fraud is a huge problem for the entire digital advertising ecosystem but especially in India where ad fraud has risen by as much as 40%.
The MMA conducted a survey to benchmark the current practices that marketers use in order to assess and combat mobile ad fraud.
Highlights from the survey include:
- Although 22% of mobile ad budgets fall victim to ad fraud, exploring new technologies or approaches to counter it is not a high priority for most marketers.
- Nine out of ten marketers are hiring dedicated external vendors, or are planning to do so in the near future, to detect and prevent fraud.
- The top three areas in which ad fraud is highest are: brand campaigns, social and publisher direct.
- Most marketers expect real-time analysis and proactive blocking of fraudulent impressions. However, service providers often offer periodic analysis which seems to be less important to marketers.
- Marketers are not very familiar with blockchain, but almost all of them believe that it has the potential to help against ad fraud.
According to another study conducted by techARC, the technology analysis, research and consulting firm, at $1.63bn, Indiaâs share in global digital ad fraud stood at 8.7% in 2018. It is expected to grow to 23% in 2019 as a result of sophisticated techniques being employed by fraudsters. Digital commerce contributed 51% of the total ad fraud in India.
Although app fraud contributes to over 85% of total digital ad fraud, web platforms are more susceptible to frauds because in several organisations the digital teams are primarily focusing on the app, leaving the webspace vulnerable. There are also several brand safety issues specifically emanating from the web, such as fake leads and keyword abuse.
Lastly, as video is becoming the preferred medium of content in India, it is attracting fraudsters to explore sophisticated fraud techniques to earn more on the premium advertising channels.
The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) Indiaâs âAd Fraud roadshowâ brought together leading marketers and subject experts in order to spread awareness and to highlight the several key challenges related to brand safety and accountability in mobile advertising, and to explore solutions for ad fraud. These roadshows addressed growing concerns in the mobile marketing industry and it was generally agreed that building standards, guidelines and best practices is the need of the hour to deter ad fraud.
Uday Sodhi, digital business head at Sony Pictures Networks India, said that he does not believe too many CMOs pay attention to ad fraud and the amount of leakage that it can cause: âI would be very worried about ad fraud [given] there is lack of awareness at the clientsâ end⌠when they say that they have put in INR100 but actually only INR50 is going into a valuable campaign and INR50 is really getting leaked out - that leakage is what the client is not aware of,â said.
âI think there is enough technology today in terms of protecting yourself but we are ignoring ad fraud when it happens. Increasing the security of every transaction is a learning process for everybody â whether itâs the client or the publisher or the intermediaries or the agencies.â
According to Jahid Ahmed, head of digital & content marketing at Indiaâs HDFC Bank, the ad fraud situation is far more grim. He said that the overall digital ad spend in India is $2bn but of this a staggering $1.6bn is wasted on fraud.
âToday, bots can imitate to an extent where they can actually talk to a call center as well, and so money is being wasted and the call center is wasting its bandwidth,â he said.
Five ways India is battling the problem
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SUPPRESSION Ahmed said that at HDFC Bank, 80% of their ad spend in India is on digital and 80% of that spend is vi mobile platforms. Understanding and combatting fraud is crucial.âWe donât believe in aggression in terms of leads, what we believe in is campaign orchestration where suppression is a key element. For example, on a shopping site, if you notice that even after the shopping is completed you continuously see the ad again and again, you get irritated. Suppression is important. I also think what is required is a unified, seamless measurement of the unique result or reach on investment.â
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ALL-ROUND EDUCATION Deepak Tahiliani, head of digital trading at GroupM India, the advertising media company, said they take a holistic approach to solving the problem.âFirst, itâs about internal education. We ourselves need to learn about what we need to do â as an agency we are custodians of the brands we handle, so we first need to step up our game. Then we need to work in parallel with clients to educate them on how this needs to be controlled to boost their confidence. We can follow a robust mechanism to educate clients on how we use third party tools to measure and then control fraud,â he said.âOn the media vendor side, we are educating them to step up their game. Sophisticated fraud is rapidly changing every day, itâs not a one-off activity. It has to be a constant build-up of education, awareness and implementation across the ecosystem.â
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SHARING DATA Vipul Kedia, chief data and platforms officer at Affle, the mobile advertising company, believes the most effective way to control ad fraud is data transparency.âI know that any brand or organisation would want to hold their data close and would not want to share it. But the best way to combat ad fraud is to allow people to measure their own matrices, wherever the publisher sources are. If we know what is the kind of efficacy we are driving for the brand, then I would automatically know where the spends are being effective or not being effective.â
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DETERENCE IS KEY At the Bangalore chapter of the roadshow, Venkatesh Kamath, associate director at Flipkart, had stated that it would be too optimistic to say that this problem can be eradicated.âI donât think the solution is elimination, I think the solution is deterrence. We make our deterrence policies very clear, we have taken a lot of steps which have ruffled a lot of feathers, but we have been persistent. But we want things to keep evolving, we want data to speak for itself, we view a whole lot of data to make sure we are able to detect fraud.â
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A NEUTRAL UMPIRE Dhiraj Gupta, CTO & founder of mFilterIt, the fraud detection and prevention company, took a contrarian view and said that publishers and agencies or anyone who is getting a part of the ad spend pie cannot be expected to take responsibility of this problem because they have a vested interest in the issue.âPlatforms will be more interested in ensuring that they have a higher media share in the ad spend, so I think a neutral, independent validator or enforcer is critical,â he said.âAdvertisers have still not matured enough to start asking the right questions, ad fraud is not just about bad traffic, it now also means organic traffic. I can have sales, leads and conversions that are fraudulent, what that means is fraud has moved to a level where someone can steal your organic traffic and show it as if they have done that advertising traffic for you.â
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