‘Standards are moving from industry-dictated to brand-customized’

At the e4m MarTech India Conference 2024, industry experts got together to discuss the business of advertising as part of the DoubleVerify: Speed, Scale and the Trends Impacting Measurement panel.

Samir Karpe, Group Director, India, DoubleVerify kickstarted the session by delving into the impact of artificial intelligence, Karpe shared how when he started working with an AI company three years ago, AI was just a buzzword. Everyone wanted to talk about it but no one knew what direction it would go. Then came ChatGPT and it became a household name. Now everyone is using AI, he said.

He then shared deep insights into the upcoming trends that illustrate the transformative impact of AI. These include:
• Petabyte scale drives AI investment for marketers
• Everything is a walled garden
• The expert interface will disappear
• AI measurement will be hybrid
• Standards moving from industry-dictated to brand-customized

Several industry leaders soon joined Karpe in the conversation, including Abbhishek Chadha, Executive Vice President of Interactive Avenues, Mayank Prabhakar, Head of Digital & Media at Vivo India, Nitin Yadav, Digital Experience & Marketing Lead (ICE Category) at MG Motors India, in a session moderated by Ishan Kapoor, Sr. Manager, ISD, DoubleVerify.

Kapoor nudged the panel to share their views on how they were navigating market fragmentation, where everything is becoming a walled garden, to drive results with media strategies.

“With an increase in internet penetration, fragmentation will compound. It’s becoming increasingly challenging for us to create strategies for our partners on how best to mitigate the fragmentation. There are a couple of key tenets we work with — to have a clear-cut view of your consumers across platforms, avoid duplication as much as possible and measure efficiency and efficacy,” said Chadha.

The conversation then moved to MFA (made-for-advertisement) content. “MFA websites could have a very high ads-to-content ratio, could have a very high reliance on paid traffic, and the same content could be popping on various sites. They don’t have any editorial value but they burn your dollars,” Karpe explained.

Prabhakar added that if the brands stopped investing in MFA content to get traffic for campaigns, these sites would shut down. However, it would require brands to go beyond the numbers and look closely into the source and authenticity of the traffic. That’s where the tools come in for identification and verification of the sites and the traffic.

The panel then discussed the various aspects of limited budgets that push brands to focus on a mix of high-quality and low-quality impressions. However, the panel noted that the brand can always choose to go for only high-quality leads, even if the budget allows them to reach fewer consumers, as it would result in better effective ROI than burning the cash and ending up with low-quality leads, even if the numbers are much higher.

The panel concluded that as measurement becomes more and more customised, brands need to optimize strategies and ad spends accordingly. It will require persistent data across the width and depth of the campaign and the media ecosystem at large.