 Next, a session is extremely interesting. Now that the digital being an integral part of our lives, it is imperative for us to create trustworthy and reliable digital networks and digital ecosystem, which allows us to not cater to the scams and frauds that we see are becoming increasingly a part of the digital system that we are a part of. So ladies and gentlemen, we have a very special speaker joining us here, throwing some more light on how data and technology can be used by the brands more effectively and what are the challenges and opportunities those lie there. And for this session, I would like to request and invite Arvind Mathur, who is product head for M-Filteric to join us on stage and take us through this very, very interesting session that is going to talk about bots and how the scams and frauds happen and how we can enable the reduction of that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you guys. Good evening. I hope you're not tired by now. I want to keep this more, I would say, interactive in a way wherein I want to understand if I'm the right track, maybe a show of hands, certain questions there, right? And I think the way we all know about the digital story. Right, sorry. There's a... How is it going to go? I don't know. Sure, all right. So I think what's interesting is to look at all brands are today embracing digital. It was about 10 years back, digital was something that was one of the media channels upcoming, television used to always dominate. But recently, with the recent trends, we see behaviors changing, we see even TV viewing moving to OTT. That's where a lot of relevance now comes to what you show, how you engage with your customers. And the other beauty about digital is that whichever stage you may be at in your customer journey, somebody might be buying a car today and they may go to the brand's website. Somebody might be considering to buy a car and they may be going to different brand's websites. Now, each of these users make a visit to the brand's website. But what you show them, what exactly are they coming to you for, how you're evaluating. I think we've heard early in the day, brands, we had MG here. So MG in a way kind of changes the pitch as to what they should be talking to a customer. Basis is online journey, right? And that's exactly the information they're offline, call center teams, call back a customer with. Should they call them for a pitch for economy? Should that pitch be about connectivity? I think those are important impediments. But what's also important is to understand how do brands read the data. So if you look at the overall landscape, digital has now become almost a $602 billion industry. In India itself, about 27,000 crores, close to about 30,000 crores, that's the estimates for this year. And that industry itself is going at about 40%. In fact, globally, by 2026, digital will actually become 73% of a total brand's online spend, which means it actually will dominate any other kind of online spend that a brand makes in the marketing space. Now what's important is to understand a lot of traffic that you see online today, whether it's users coming in or whether you go to any website. A lot of these widgets are made by bots and softwares. Certain part of these bots are actually good bots. They help you index pages. They would crawl your pages. They help you rank higher in SEO. But a lot of these are bad bots as well. Now the difference here being that a good bot would actually come and declare itself. It'll actually carry those parameters as part of its own user agent information. And you'll understand it's a bot that's come onto a website. But for a bad bot, it'll actually hide identities, right? And that's one of the largest challenges. It'll hide identity. It'll actually make you feel if it's a genuine user who's come onto the website. But in a sense, it'll actually be a bot or a software. And you've had recent tweets about, Elon Musk talking about Twitter. It says about 20% fake spam accounts, while four times what Twitter claims would be much higher, which means there's substantial number of fake accounts that Elon Musk is talking about. And that's what's influencing the entire valuation for Twitter. Now this is the problem that brands need to stand up today and realize. So this year, I think brands will close to reach, lose about $68 billion globally to ad fraud, right? And that's a big money. What this also means is that ad fraud itself has become an industry. It's not a problem, but it's an industry. And every year we see more and more mature ad frauds coming through, engaging with brands, and draining brand budgets, right? Now, the other aspect of it is that we also see a lot of talk about programmatic, right? Programmatic is gonna be big. It's gonna be the talk of the town. That's where the budgets will move. Programmatic will give the wall gardens a run for their money because brands will have more options. But what we are really moving towards is also an area that brands still completely don't understand. And there's a lot of legwork required to build in the right level of transparency. So right now there's a lack of transparency. The inventories that are being out there and the quality of that inventory is purely measured today on a viewability matrix, right? Is the inventory viewable, not viewable? What percentage is viewable? And then there are parameters like what reach you have, what frequency distribution you have, you put them into play. Now, when we look at that data closely, what we also realize is that a lot of those impressions of views are actually now coming from a concentrated set of devices, which means we probably are not meeting your reach goals, which means there's another industry behind how you actually amplify your budgets there and how those budgets gets consumed. And further than there are safety issues of the brand as well. For example, one recent large FMCG campaign, we saw about 20% impressions being served onto blank websites, which had no content, right? In fact, on CTV, if you're actually targeting users on Roku and other devices, even if they switch off the TV, the ads keep displaying out on those devices, right? Now, those are issues that need to be addressed with time as the industry matures, as the fraud matures, as advertisers mature. I think these are areas that need to be looked into. And what we also not just see is about what is happening in programmatic, but even if you look at the wall card and kind of campaigns, if you look at channels like Google, Facebook, GDN, DV360, which is programmatic, YouTube, there is fraud everywhere in these campaigns as well. And one of the largest reasons that it exists is because each one of those are themselves large networks. So today, Google works with about 3 million plus publishers. Facebook, audience network is about 2 million plus publishers. Now, who's contributing? These publishers get paid when they actually generate clicks and impressions from their pages. And in order to amplify their business, they would also commit fraud. And these are the broad fraud percentages that we see across different markets. And this is first-party data that infinite itself audits across an area of brands. We do this for Amazon. We do this for Flipkart. We do this for multiple brands across different categories. Right? And I think one quick question could be, why would Google be doing fraud on pure search? So in pure search, you have multiple forms of bots that show up, which are trying to capture intelligence information as to what keywords you should build on, what keywords you should advertise on. And because of these marketing insights, it's these crawlers which run on these campaigns as well. And that's why I also want a pure Google search campaign. You still see about 8% to 9% fraud there. Right? And I think the other aspect of it is the infringement use cases for a brand. Right? So if you look at brands which are all advertising, what if a brand doesn't advertise? Do they need to look up as to what's happening with them on the web? Yes, they do. And why do they need to do that is because you have infringement as a huge problem coming up through. In fact, today, I think most of us would be aware that the RBI itself sends messages to customers saying that please don't call any banks contacts website by searching the brand on Google. Please pick up the contact number from the brand's own website. Now, why they say that is because a lot of fake call centers, a lot of fraudsters, can actually list those specific call center numbers onto a Google search campaign, and they can run those ads. So what we see here is probably a fake offer running for credit card. We see brand impersonation. For example, in this case, PhonePay's website is being replicated. I remember having a discussion about six to eight months ago with a brand who said that substantial number of my orders are actually coming from a single channel. And that single channel was this one single affiliate who had actually replicated the entire site of the brand in an iFrame, and the orders being punched through that. And I was surprised because the brand themselves didn't do those numbers what the affiliate was doing for them at an overall level. So this is where whenever I see growth hack, and whenever I see abnormal numbers coming through, a brand needs to look at those numbers in more detail at a more granularity to understand if the data is fine or if there's any leakage happening anywhere. Similarly, you will have account takeover and credential takeover as a branch problem. Now, imagine brands like OTT brands like Hotstar or Netflix for that matter. Now, when they publish their account informations and the account informations get leaked out or hacked into, the same user account is now available across the web to be to multiple different users. And fraudsters would be selling them at dirty prices. Now, this gives a direct hit to the brand. So this means wherever you have got subscription-based revenues, wherever you have got revenue streams that are, you have a model of customers consuming product online, the challenge of account takeovers or losing credentials is always existing, even with your bank accounts for that matter, right? Now, what really a brand needs to understand is that in the entire customer journey, they're spending money on a customer at every stage to actually have that customer stay with the brand. And about 60% of that budget gets actually spent on the acquisition journey itself, right? So which means you want to first show a brand, you want to come into a consideration set. For that, you may be running a brand campaign. You want to then probably get into a stage where the brand searches for you and engages with you. That's where you start doing search campaigns. You want to target the brand in the right context. So if somebody is searching for holidays and somebody is searching for holidays in the mountains, you may be wanting to show him a camping ad, right? And you go to them with a camping creative, right? Or a resort in the middle of the mountains. You don't want to show them a beach, right? So basis that contextuality, you need to always constantly optimize. And all of these have their own costs. Once the customer also fills in and says, I'm interested, then it's when you get a lead as well. Now, is that lead being taken directly from the customer? Or is that lead being organically hijacked? These are all scenarios where we see leakages on the customer acquisition side happening. For a lot of leads, the customer may have come to the brand organically, but the attribution model can be faked to pass that lead to some other affiliate or some other channel. And click injection and cookie stuffing are very common use cases to be doing this, right? So there are multiple issues faced and the brand needs to, so these are the risks involved when a brand traverses the digital journey. And there are pitfalls that a brand needs to look through. But what's the path ahead? So how does a brand prepare itself? What kind of opportunity is coming, right? So a brand needs to constantly understand at a granular level as to what data they're looking at. Typically, the story goes is that every band, every data set tells a story. Every band has to look at what data they have. They have to understand how these customers engage with them. But before even you reach there, what you need to understand is what data set are you looking at? Are these data sets spoofed on basis which you make business decisions? Are these data sets actually coming from actual customers? Or are these data sets stimulated, right? So improving ROI basis, what humans do on your page or on your brand assets is something that's of paramount importance, right? Further, you can actually integrate the same information into your CRM, into your lead square kind of a database. It's all a sales force kind of a database where wherever an outbound dialing exists, you can prioritize these leads. I think everybody knows if you make a lead, if you fill up a form, if I respond at that form, maybe five days down the line, you may not be interested. But what if I qualify that lead and I call you back in the next 10 minutes or the next five minutes? Now that's being responsive. And if I know which lead is to be called when or which lead is actually genuine enough to be invested upon, that's where the brand will make a difference, right? I think further, if you don't look at these aspects or maybe you choose to currently know these aspects, then we've seen cases where brands have not been able to protect their interests. A fake infringement case would have happened and the customer would have actually filed a petition against the brand in court, but it was actually a fraudster who was using the brand's name and dealing with the customer, right? So these are areas that a brand as digital involves. These are areas or pitfalls which brand needs to look out for. They need to protect their businesses around these different domains. And these are again opportunities because the brands who do this and who move in this direction actually will be the ones who will be protecting their business as well as building their businesses. Because as we understand, e-commerce is growing slowly but steadily. I remember about 12 years back, I used to sit in an office. I think this was a Samsung thing I was sitting with. And what we were debating is why can't fridges be bought online? Why, you know, why is there a challenge? The challenge was that at that point in time, everybody felt that having an off-the-counter discussion will get me a better rate or a better negotiation. Plus I want to see the service, right? What fridge am I buying? I want to touch and feel and understand that. Now we've crossed that stage where users want to do that. So the first services that actually kicked off and were bought online were basically train tickets, movie tickets, airline tickets, where we understood that even if you buy it over the counter, you might not get a better rate but the service will be the same, right? So I think what in principle I wanted to talk about is the aspects or the digital pitfalls that brands need to be aware about. And of course, they need to work today to start safeguarding these. A lot of these capabilities may be internally existing for a brand. And some of these can be actually plugged in through working with partners like us. And this is precisely where I think the overall value generation for brands from digital comes up, right? So that's all, guys. That's me. I'm Arvind. This is a quick ad. That I tried, one slide I'll put in and this is really what happens in case of an ad fraud, right? You have an ad unit which never shows up but you consider this to be viewable, right? Thank you, guys.