Ad fraud is a huge problem for the digital advertising ecosystem globally and it is becoming a major issue in India where ad fraud has risen by as much as 40%, but marketers have been slow to respond.

When the Mobile Marketing Association in India conducted a survey to benchmark the current practices that marketers use in order to assess and combat mobile ad fraud, it found that the three areas in which ad fraud is highest are brand campaigns, social and publisher direct.

It also reported that 22% of mobile ad budgets fall victim to ad fraud, but exploring new technologies or approaches to counter it is not a high priority for most marketers.

“I would be very worried about ad fraud [given] there is lack of awareness at the clients’ end,” observed Uday Sodhi, digital business head at Sony Pictures Networks India at an Ad Fraud roadshow organised by the MMA.

The Ad Fraud roadshow brought together leading marketers and subject experts in order to spread awareness and to highlight key challenges related to brand safety and accountability in mobile advertising, and to explore solutions for ad fraud. (For more, read WARC’s report: Five ways India is fighting rampant ad fraud.)

“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,” Sodhi said, adding that the technology is there to protect brands from an ad fraud problem which is too often being ignored.

“Increasing the security of every transaction is a learning process for everybody – whether it’s the client or the publisher or the intermediaries or the agencies,” he stated.

Sourced from WARC