"Ad fraud is not just about bad traffic, it's also about organic traffic": Dhiraj Gupta, CTO & founder, mFilterIt

A panel discussion at the recent MMA road-show tried to answer the question - "Who is ultimately responsible for ad fraud?"

ET Now's senior editor Sonali Krishna moderated a session at the MMA's ad fraud road-show 2019, promising hard hitting statements and controversial questions. The panel discussion was meant to derive a better understanding of who was ultimately responsible for ad fraud.

Krishna began with a loose definition of ad fraud before introducing the topic. "There is a global consensus that ad fraud is a growing menace, but who is ultimately responsible? Where does the buck stop and who takes ownership...," she asked.

From left to right, Uday Sodhi, Rahul Sethi, Dhiraj Gupta, Sonali Krishna, Deepak Tahiliani, Mohit Kapoor and Rohit Chatter
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She asked Deepak Tahiliani, head of digital trading at GroupM India, if the scale of ad fraud right now, is potentially due to chasing vanity metrics such as likes, shares, impressions etc.

"We are responsible for creating too much of jargon and vanity metrics in this ecosystem," admitted Tahiliani. "The reason there's so much of fraud is because there's too much money that's going into spending on digital. There's a rampant increment in investments there and given the fragmentation and technology gaps in understanding where the money is going and the supply chain not being completely clean... I believe all of these are reasons why this is happening," he told the audience.

Uday Sodhi, the digital business head at SonyLiv emphasised on the importance of understanding the digital advertising environment. "It has been around for the past 5-7 years and it's really matured in India over that time. Mainstream advertisers have really taken to digital advertising as well. There's a whole process of learning and the challenge in the market lies in awareness. I don't think too many CMOs today pay attention to ad fraud and the amount of leakage it can cause," he stated.

He went back to the point of chasing vanity metrics saying, "Chasing metrics is different from saying there's a leakage in terms of ad fraud. I would be more worried about ad fraud when there's a lack of awareness from the client's end. There's enough technology to protect yourself and ensure ad fraud doesn't happen. We also must create awareness about the types of ad fraud that can happen," he said.

Mohit Kapoor, VP, group alliances and advertising at Reliance Jio, shared his point of view, "It depends on the maturity of the client and the state of business they're in. We see younger brands trying to do different things and more mature brands who have seen it all, dealing with this very often. The big spenders know what they're doing. When a client deals with a large platform, it reduces the amount of fraud that can happen."

He added that ad fraud mostly occurs on thematic websites and that platforms are a little safer. "Larger platforms have a bigger responsibility because somewhere, we know that if we're generating X number of impressions or Y number of clicks or Z number of purchase transactions, we should proactively go back and suggest variations here and there to educate the client to protect himself from ad fraud," he elaborates.

Dhiraj Gupta, the CTO and founder of mFilterIt was the last speaker of the day. "Why should there be vanity metrics or performance metrics? Why not both? Is it too much to ask for an advertiser, spending millions of dollars, to request both? The thought that vanity metrics 'can be fake' and 'will be fake' is not necessarily true," he points out.

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He went on to emphasise that anyone who's involved in the media spends pie - either a publisher or an agency - cannot be responsible for where the buck stops because they all have vested interests. "Platforms will be more interested in ensuring they have a media share and media spend rather than trying to figure out and do things which are in the interest of the client. A neutral, independent validator is critical to validate the information and ensure that nobody is taking the advertiser for a ride. I think the buck stops with us. We can ensure that advertisers are setting the right KPIs and the right targets," he said.

ALSO READ: Worrying levels of digital ad fraud demand solutions

Gupta also pointed out that advertisers still haven't matured enough to start asking the right questions. "Ad fraud is not just about bad traffic; now, it's also about organic traffic. I can have fraudulent sales, I can have fake performance and I can have fraudulent conversions. What that means is that fraud is at a level where someone can steal your organic traffic and showcase it fraudulently. In other words, you can have a source that gives you thousands of dollars of sales and orders, but all of that can be fraudulent because that source/publisher packaged it to show it as organic traffic. I can actually meet all the ROI requirements and still commit fraud," he shrugged.

"If the advertiser is willing to pay extra for the ROI, they're going to get and create this consortium and come up with defined ad regulations in the same way that we have data regulation. That's what can bring sanity into this system," said Rohit Chatter, CTO of enterprise platform, InMobi, as he concluded the session.