Navigating through media quality landscape and strategies to deploy

When it comes to media quality, DoubleVerify has seen a huge positive impact amongst advertisers, especially in India concerning three core media quality parameters: brand safety, viewability and fraud. A panel of experts gathered at the Pitch CMO Summit 2024 in Bengaluru to discuss what media quality means to their brands and what strategies they have been deploying to achieve optimal media quality. 

The panellists were Chetan Sharma, Head of Digital Marketing, Cleartrip; Gaurang Thosani, Head of Digital Marketing & e-Sales, Royal Sundaram General Insurance; Gaurav Tyagi, Associate Vice President, Interactive Avenues and Kunwarbir Singh, Senior Global Marketing Manager, Lenovo and Samir Karpe, Group Director, India, DoubleVerify. The panel was moderated by Jaiti Hariani, Senior Business Director, DoubleVerify. 

Singh shared that viewability as a parameter is crucial to Lenovo. “As a category that has a very long pre-purchase behaviour, it is very important for our campaigns to have a view-through rate that is extremely high,” he said. Hairani added to the importance of viewability by mentioning how brands in India park 70-80% of their monies towards video campaigns. Ironically, a DoubleVerify report further highlighted that around 50% of those ads are never seen as well. 

Tyagi said that among the brands that he works with, there is a set of them who are ‘always on’ and want to curtail ad fraud as much as possible. “However, there are still a set of brands who are hung up on cost efficiency and in isolation, not in conjunction with the viewability or the quality of ad impressions,” he mentioned. It is still, Tyagi added, just the Fortune 500 brands or big MNCs who are adopting measures to curtail fraud. 

Delving further, Sharma shared that Cleartrip finds brand safety to be very crucial when it comes to media quality. “We are closely monitoring brand safety and making sure that we are seen at the right place and right sites. We track everything at a ROAS level, not just performance campaigns but even our brand campaigns,” he said. 

The discussion shifted gears to the role AI is playing in media buying. Karpe highlighted that every impression a brand buys today is buying towards an action. “AI gives you that ability today to move beyond the traditional metrics of buying media, which are just CPMs or CPVs. In these cases, marketers need to understand how AI can function and, the new optimisation techniques that are now available to them. You are no longer just buying vanity metrics, you are buying towards a business outcome,” he said. 

Thosani mentioned that he looks at the entire funnel, to understand if campaigns can be optimised at each level. “This is where I can improve my cost of acquisition. With the level of control that IRDAI has on us, we need to ensure that the cost of acquisition is of a certain percentage, and optimisation is the key to keep that in control,” he added. 

Speaking from an agency perspective about how to ensure brand safety and suitability without impacting scale, Tyagi said, “From our set of brands, there was a lot of participation during the Lok Sabha election this year. Beyond just the platform providing content exclusions and inclusions, we ensured it through using viewability partners, through using additional categories to add to the protective layer of strength.” 

Thosani mentioned that there isn’t a foolproof solution today to navigate the same challenges. “But we are exploring. When COVID hit us, how we communicate, who we communicate to, and where we communicate, everything changed overnight. That opened our eyes to the risks that we are facing today. Looking forward to some suitable, robust solutions for it,” he said. 

The panel also discussed the imminent rise of Made-For-Advertising websites, wherein Karpe said that these basically are the sites where there is content, there is a lot of ad inventory but doesn’t serve marketers’ goals. “Advertisers at DoubleVerify use our programmatic solutions, they have a choice of using the standard brand suitability and safety solutions or even custom-made for them,” he said. 

Singh added that MFA indeed is something that Lenovo is trying to pave its way through. “As a percentage it is not very high in terms of how it shows up in some of our campaigns. Currently, audits for whitelisting and blacklisting are done with the support of our partners. So while we have not seen a lot of impressions being lost to MFA sites, the fear is real,” he mentioned.