 Welcome to this special discussion, where we are going to talk about Adfrot, something which concerns all of us, especially in the digital space. If you look closely, Adfrot has been a persistent problem for many years now and over the last five months, especially when there has been a big digital leap, Adfrot has become concerned that needs to be sorted on priority. And the fact that there are lots of billions of dollars every year to advertisers, to brands, because of Adfrot online, there is a need to build a movement to address this issue. And that's exactly what we're doing here at Exchange for Media. So Exchange for Media, in partnership with M Filtered, has decided to take on this Adfrot in a very big way. So this is the first one of the series of attempts that we are making and today we are discussing what are the ways, what are the most effective ways to address this problem. And with us today, we have an esteemed panel of experts. Let me introduce them. We have with us Mr. Pawrush Elabhia, who is the Head Digital Marketing and Growth, Z5. He also manages the entire digital marketing piece for Z5. Welcome, Mr. Elabhia. We have Mr. Arvind Arpi, Director of Marketing and Communications, McDonald's, India. He has a rich experience of 20 years of sales and marketing and understands this bit very well. And welcome, Mr. Arvind, to this discussion. We have Mr. Ankit Bangar. He's the Head of Marketing, India Bulls Housing and Dhani. Let me tell you that he has been instrumental in the digital transformation of selling traditional financial products. And he has been the person who has made Dhani the growth story. Everyone knows about it. He's the man responsible for it. Welcome, Mr. Bangar. We also have Mr. Gaurav Shittak. He's the Vice President and Head of Digital Marketing, Sher Khan. Gaurav comes with a rich experience in diverse sectors such as retail, e-commerce, cement, hospitality. So he's going to share his diverse viewpoints with us today. And finally, we also have Mr. Prabhakar Tiwari, CMO, Angel Broking Limited. Mr. Tiwari Spir has brand performance marketing and PR initiatives for the firm. As we know, the firm has seen rapid improvements in the digital maturity metrics and market share gains under his leadership. Welcome, Mr. Tiwari. And last and not the least is Mr. Dheeraj Gupta, CTO and co-founder and Directorate. He will be moderating this special panel on ad fraud. So I hand it over to Mr. Gupta from here over to you. Thank you so much, Rohail, for the kind introduction and to all my panelists and to the attendees. Welcome to this session. We're going to keep this very, very engaging and I hope to get the key insights out from this esteemed panel. We have with us a very high, we have an interesting panel because we have three participants from the fintech space. We have a representation from the OTT space and from snacking and food delivery. And I think in these interesting times of COVID, I think these are industries OTT fintech and maybe a little bit of education we could have added in what is where most of the focus and attention has been on and deliveries and online presence has become very, very important in this period. Just giving a sense, Maruti came out with a very interesting fact recently saying that about 50% of the test drives actually got booked digitally. I mean, Never Ever is an automotive giant which has always been using dealership distributors for its offline inventory is coming and saying 50% of my test drives got booked digitally. That's I think a massive shift with something like COVID has done and we have brands like LG and Sony opening up e-stores, Marks and Spencer opening its e-store in India in the last couple of months. So direct to consumer has become a big thing. Now obviously when this happens, unfortunately, it also brings with it a bubble and in a lot of cases bubbles end up converting into fraud. So a recent study we did for a lot of our clients saw that attempts for ad fraud actually increased in the last three months. And more and more focus has been on digital, which means there are more dollars to steal. And hence the in terms of absolute value, there is a higher trend in fraud in the last couple of months, which I think is important for all of us to be aware about. Some interesting and the other part which I wanted to also do a quick introduction on is I don't know if you track the recent rally by President Trump, very different topic. President Trump started a rally in Tulsa and they opened up a registration page which had a phone number registration and a million Republicans signed up for that. A million new people signed up for attending that rally. Mr. Trump was very excited and that a million people are going to attend this rally. When he landed, that rally was attended by 6,000 people and it was found that all those registrations which were coming on the lead page were actually bots. So I think if the President of United States can get impacted by something like this, then I think we are mere mortals. I think all of us need to be conscious and with humility accept that bots are present everywhere. It's important that we protect the campaigns against it. So let me carry forward the discussion based on this introduction. So what I will do is I will run through each of the panelists and what I want to understand first for the audience is what kind of campaigns are you running in your organization? When you're running those campaigns, how are you measuring them? What is the measuring platform you're using? And what are the metrics you're using to identify whether you're meeting the key ROI metrics on it or not? So just try and get the baseline set in so that all of us know exactly what kind of campaign is running and how you're measuring it. So let's start. Ankit, over to you. Maybe you want to start first as to what you're running, how you're measuring and what are the key things you're looking out for right now on your campaign. So thank you, Neeraj. And hi, everyone. So basically, we run Dhoni app campaigns, which are largely app focused campaigns. And there are multiple products now on Dhoni. And therefore, there are different objectives of each campaign that we run. And not necessarily that we don't run on common objectives because there's a different business goal or a different goal that we're trying to achieve with each campaign that we run. So primarily, our campaigns are top focused to registrations. And we have now evolved from running installed campaigns to at least minimum if you have to run a top of the funnel campaign, we will prefer running a registration focused campaigns. And then obviously, we have deeper funnel event campaigns that we run, but the ROI definitely, by the end of the day, we measure basis orders and acquisitions or dispersals or sanctions or etc. So which are slightly more deeper, but that's the internal evaluation that we do for each campaign. However, when we're running on digital platforms, we use either of these two events to run campaigns. Coming to what platforms are we using, we're looking at the scale that we would want to achieve. We try and use all platforms, possibly all the bitable media and the affiliate side of media. However, we obviously focus largely on the bitable media to start with and then supplement the whole campaigns with affiliates, etc. So that's about it. Okay, Parush, over to you, Zeefai. Hey, thanks, Yajia. So yeah, for us as well, we use, for us, we're an OTT app, right? So we use a lot of user acquisition campaigns to begin with. That's the first thing that we start off with getting the users on board, ensuring that they are starting and engaging with our app. After that, we use town funnel campaigns, which basically convert users from viewing videos to actually going ahead and then subscribing to our platform as well. We run campaigns, we and my team run campaigns across the globe, right? So Zeefai now is an app which is available all the way from Canada to UK to Middle East, Bangladesh, Pakistan everywhere, right? So we basically run campaigns on multiple platforms, multiple types of campaigns we have to do. So yeah, we go through bitable media, we go through programmatic, we go through network affiliates and web as well as app is where we see all of our campaign structure being kind of meshed up. Yeah, understood. Arvind from McDonald's site. Yeah, so over the years, our focus has shifted significantly towards digital, away from traditional media. And on digital, we do a fair bit of both branding and performance campaign through the year. Performance campaign for Mac delivery, which is for food delivery, largely is app focused on our app Mac delivery with a small chunk of website focus. And again, in terms of platforms, we do focus on bitable, programmatic, fair bit of affiliates and hence a significant issue of ad frauds to tackle. And yeah, so broadly that's the kind of span that we have through the year. Understood. Gaurav and then Mr Prabhakar, if you could shed some light on that. Gaurav. Okay, so probably from our side, we do all the campaigns, we are very heavy on digital. I think digital is the primarily medium for us. Others are always secondary medium. So probably we are doing all sort of campaigns, right? We eat on social media, we eat app, we eat app, we eat marketing, bitable, programmatic and so on and so forth. And primarily if you really ask me from a ROI perspective or what are the matrices, it depends. It depends on the objective because I normally see that we are kind of in the support to a business. So maybe a business team has a different goal or objective to achieve. So probably a campaign has to be made that way. Probably sometime it is hardcore performance, which is the maximum of your time and budget goes because that drives the organization, but definitely sometime businesses also have an objective to reach out to certain set of customers and so on and so forth. I think objectives vary from campaign to campaign, but ultimately if you ask me the goal standard is after doing all attribution, first click, last click, whatever you want to do, you are putting this much of money, how much money you were able to generate and what was the velocity of the money, how fast quickly you were able to recover that money. That could be maybe for a hardcore performance campaign, that could be, but yes, definitely there are other campaigns, which we also run, each campaign has their own set of objectives. So effectively return on expense is I think what you are optimizing against and making sure that you are getting more in terms of the returns from the investment you are putting in. Obviously that has to, that I think is the major part of anybody who is maybe leading a marketing, probably if you have put in so much of money what is coming out, maybe whether you build a brand or you do a performance campaign, you do whatever, but over a period of time that money has to start coming back to the organization. Now I think before we just come to Mr. Thivari, I think kudos to all of you because we keep coming across a lot of advertisers who are still focused on vanity metrics, who are still focused on impression campaigns. I think all of you, by our being and dealing with performance issues and getting focusing on ROS, which is the end metric which you can always make sure you are actually getting value for the organization. So thank you for that. Mr. Thivari from your side. Yeah, thanks, thanks Akshay for media and I am filter it for this panel discussion. I'm glad to be here and talking about angel broking like we are a digital broker, two and a half decades old, so we have seen a lot of digital transformation and we believe in full funnel marketing and the full funnel marketing means that the brand team and the performance marketing team has to work very closely and definitely digital is the kind of main medium for us there. So in case of performance marketing, of course, like we use Bidible, we have programmatic, we have DB360, we have network affiliates, so multiple kind of marketing efforts and there our focus is more both in paid and organic. In paid, we have DB360, GA360 and Google campaign manager. So it's a full stack which is there and we also done a lot of AIML programs also just to kind of make our campaigns more efficient. Now talking about the metrics, of course, basically we look at CO and CPL like everything kind of boils down to that in performance marketing and in brand marketing also we have moved from a TV led model to more YouTube and OTT led model. So we have experimented a lot with Hotstar, earlier Tiktok, Naruposo, Chingari, MX player, Geo TV, multiple platform we check out and apart from looking at CPV and Cosper install, we also look at CPL and COO of brand campaign also. We allow it to be slightly higher, so that's fine, but we have also seen that sometimes they are very competitive and coming to ad fraud scenario there could be multiple, however, thankfully, programmatic give us a lot of control in apps flyer, we are able to look at a lot of these control feature which are there. So overall, we are very clear that we have to be more efficient as a market here, so ad fraud is a big concern and we look at new age tools to solve it. Yeah, by the way, when you're mentioning all the OTT's, Parush was smiling and he was wondering, you know, I'm sure he's going to reach out to you after this. Hey, get this, I want, but thank you so much. So let's just quickly jump in on the whole ad fraud thing. So Ankit, you've been, you know, on this whole Dany app, Dany app has a lot of field tech focus and obviously there's a lot of, there's more to lose than just marketing dollars, right? I mean, potentially, you're probably losing on financials and so on, which is a more heavily regulated sector. So from that viewpoint, any interesting fraud examples you saw and you encountered which might be very interesting for the audience, some examples on your marketing in the last, say, one minute or two years. So, Dheeraj, I think fraud is part and parcel of your life now, especially when you're running performance. So, you know, and I keep telling and keep thinking that you have to be there actually one step ahead of you always. So, you know, by the time you've figured out a way of fraud, you realize this, oh, there's this also and there's something else also because they continuously keep evolving. So it's more like a, you know, Tom and Jerry chairs of trying to figure out how who's smarter than the other and how do you try to filter out fraud fraudsters because frankly, it's about money and people are thinking, you know, day and night to figure out how to spam or, you know, cheat or how to generally make money. And frauds happen, I think in various ways and kinds. And, you know, some that are purely visible to the eye and some that you won't even realize are happening, you know, and then over a period of time you over a period of time because by the time you're able to detect, you know, you've already realized that 10 days have already gone by the campaigns. So we use, you know, after as our attribution tool and and we've definitely enabled the protection 60. That's the hygiene thing that you would, you know, that you would land up doing to ensure that the fraud is at least controlled at a high level. What what we also do is a lot of our affiliate payouts are generally based out of the CRM numbers and they're not based out of any other, you know, third party tool as well. So that's one way that we try to ensure that, you know, we are we are ensuring that we don't the other other other thing that we do is we try to put certain metrics between, you know, say registration to a business goal, if that's not met by certain affiliates or by certain campaigns, then that's the that's the campaign that we try and dig deep if you know if they're underperforming by what the regular organic orbitable media would show ratios like in terms of examples, you know, like we have I mean, there are multiple examples, you know, when we started affiliates, affiliates, we used to see app decompilation happening, we used to see events getting triggered on a platform and and not having any any any numbers in the CRM or we used to see cases where, you know, the organic suddenly would go down like organic numbers would suddenly start like steep, you know, stood down to like less than 20% or so, which used to be like 50% odd. So you realize that there is something happening, you know, and that's probably either click fraud, click injection, app decompilation, I mean, there are multiple ways device ID. So I think what's more important, so these are like examples and, you know, recently we did one campaign and we realized that people people are people are, you know, they create scripts of your app, and they, you know, circulate the scripts in the market for people to take advantage. So it depends on it, you know, you have to be you have to understand how are you paying your affiliates or how are you paying your users for, you know, and how do you then see and then figure out how do you ensure that there is no, I mean, how do you protect yourself from these fraud things? Yeah, so I think those are like a couple of examples business examples. Understood. No, thank you so much, Ankit. I think I think as performance market is one thing which we deal with, I think, which brand marketers don't deal with is that if you're getting too good a performance, then you're most likely getting fraud traffic, you're getting too bad a performance, obviously it's bad, but too good is also bad. Yeah, you can't get happy even. Yeah, that's a mystery which I think brand marketers never have experienced and I think you see the data and you say, hey, this channel is outstanding and you suddenly get a get that. Okay, all of it was bad, right? Parush, we heard a lot from Ankit on app. What is your thought on web? What do you use for web tracking? And how do you protect yourself on fraud on web? Sure, so I think right now we're using GA for our web tracking. Like app, there are a lot of options on the app side to kind of protect ourselves from fraud detection. Even after you detect, how do you kind of take care of everything on that? On the website, there are lesser options is what we found. It is also I think because the ecosystem at least on the media side is moving more towards the app, right? More and more consumption is happening on the app side, more and more usage is happening on that side. So web is kind of the forgotten lost and in the background right now. On the website, the kind of campaigns we run on the website are more to do with user acquisition and let's say wanting users to stream a particular content that we have with us, right? So over there, we find even more problems and the kind of markets we do web marketing in. Like I mentioned Pakistan, Bangladesh, which is kind of similar to where India is right now. A lot more challenges, a lot more fraud happening over there. And fraud happens at all multiple levels, right? I mean, in the end, you have to understand you're paying a particular partner for giving you something. So it could be paying a particular partner to giving you a click, to giving you an install, to giving you a user to come on board, remarketing, new user, anything, right? So the incentive for the users, for the partner or the sub partner is always there to kind of send some traffic for which he would not have to kind of pay for and pocket the profits as such, right? So on the website, yeah, we found a lot of happening to us, especially in countries where we do this in Southeast Asia, in the South region in Bangladesh as well. I think, yeah, that's understood. By the way, you know, one of the issues, of course, in web is that as you rightly said, a lot of advertisers are on DL like yourself. And some of the tools which have become very popular in app are not present right in web. By the way, GA just, you know, suffers actually from some really bad weaknesses. It's very easily spoofable. A lot of advertisers are not aware that, you know, GA actually doesn't protect against fraud. It only flags of only those cases which are known, but so what's which are good, but like the Google search bot or the phone, which are declaring themselves, but GA will remove those. But apart from that, GA doesn't do about it. And that's typically, you know, surprises a lot of advertisers. In fact, one thing which I can recommend all advertisers tuned into this is that, you know, the default attribution window on GA is normally six months, which means that if an organic source drove a visit today, for the next six months, when that user comes organically, GA will still track it against the original source. So that's the default setting. And unless you've gone and changed it consciously, you might just be overlapping your organic traffic very, very heavily on GA. That's something which a lot of advertisers missed out on. Okay, God of over to you. I want to, you know, check with you on more on lead campaigns. I'm sure that as FinTech, your lead CPL campaigns are a mainstay. What's your thought on fraud on lead campaigns? How are you dealing with that? And I'm sure a lot of this would have, you know, also will boil down into your call center and customer care services where, you know, fraud ends up hitting and impacting your call center agent in terms of, you know, badly, what's your thought on that? So you rightly said, I think the performance campaign on an elite campaign, as one of the speaker also mentioned, it also depends on the commercial you have, right? Wherever the marketer will put in his money, the fraud will start happening in that way. For example, if you say, okay, I will pay you per lead, then you will get a lot of junk lead or something like that. Then you maybe move to a next level, you may say, okay, on disposition, which we come from, say the team, then you put OTP, then something new kind of things happen, right? Then you say, okay, I will only pay for account opening, then some new kind of frauds happen. So I think it's just a, you don't know, so fraud is happening, but you don't know which one is the fraud one, right? And probably, ultimately, you spend some money, maybe after two, three months, you say, okay, I'm not recovering my money, maybe this is not working and so on and so forth, or maybe you can have various check and balances in between. Sometimes you can have a tool in between or maybe you look at IP, but I think it's fraudsters are running ahead, then marketers, I would say, wherever you put in money, they come with some solution for the revenue leakage. So that's how this entire thing works, right? So if you say CPL, then something will happen on CPL, if you say impression, so impression to any which way is like a bot and all that stuff, even if you went till the account opening level where you need PAN, ADAR, everything you need, right? There also, you will see they're so smart that probably they come up with something or the other that, so they are great educators, I look at these people, right? I think they educate you a lot, I think they make your, you think that, okay, now nobody, there would be no revenue leakage or maybe no marketing leakage and you will say, okay, this is the most tightest contract I can have and suddenly you will see some affiliate, some partner outsmarting you. So I think that's the reality of life and we all have to accept it, but yes. No, I came out with a very interesting, we were working, this credit card company was actually running a campaign on one of the largest e-commerce portal and point was that you register for a credit card, you put your interest for a credit card and you get a gift voucher from on that e-commerce portal, right? Now, normally it would not go wrong, you are running on one of the largest e-commerce portal in the country, people will have to fill up their credit details for applying and they were actually further doing a civil check and an adhar check to further validate it, right? They actually got credit card lead from Amitabh Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan and Jayavadri and all for a 500 rupee gift voucher and the crazy part was that they were all civil validated and because what was there was that the plan numbers and date of birth information for a lot of these famous people is publicly available. So someone just went and filled up these forms and when they tried to validate that plan number on civil it existed, the date of birth match, the name matched, right? Abhishek Bachchan exist as a person, but of course he was not filling up the credit card lead, right? So very innovative people out there and I think always a learning opportunity for everyone to understand. Mr. Prabhakar, Gaurav just mentioned that, for example on impressions, right? And obviously if someone can fake an account opening then impressions is like easy money, right? I know you mentioned that you're running on programmatic which is effectively a CPM based campaign. What are your thoughts on fraud protection on programmatic campaign and how are you protecting yourself against it? See first of all we do not go for empty impression, it doesn't help and we have certain benchmark in terms of our impression to click ratio which are already very established because we have been spending a lot on Google platform for a very long time. So we have an idea for our search campaign, display campaign, video campaign, discovery campaigns, you know what are the click impression ratio we have and all of that. So when we work with any publisher we're sure that you know our kind of contracts are very watertight and also in case if it kind of goes kind of in a different direction altogether either too good or too bad that's when we have a discussion. So far what we have seen that we have been able to kind of you know some payment we have kind of not made we told them this is not possible this is an issue either you know about it don't know about it but solve for it here is our data and that's how we have managed so far. So we have been able to do all of that because we have a lot of history running non-programmatic and a lot of data points which are available at the touch of a button and we are able to compare performance. So that has been our advantage. No but Mr. Devary just just spending two more minutes on that how do you know that the data which you have itself right now is not polluted. I mean one of the issues is a baseline issue right I mean you are what you're basically comparing is that a new performance should be very similar to an older performance. How do you know that the older performance was not throat for example? No you're right I mean I wouldn't say that you know we have a full proof model there but it's a matter of being a range bound you know that range is expected and also you know we are working with partners you know who have done it like far longer and for variety of categories than you know ours right. So we also take their kind of views on this. Having said that I believe a lot more needs to be done. We also use Provec 360 from Apps Flyer but mostly we don't do much affiliate campaign on mobile so it doesn't work for us so much and also over time we have cut down on our affiliate campaign because we have seen our app campaign giving us better conversion and more cost efficient so we have cut down on affiliate campaigns. So that way like you know I would believe that our exposure seems to be on a lower side but of course I'm sure this if there are solutions we can definitely try it on. No absolutely I mean the sense I'm getting from the audiences that all of you have some tools and protections in place but you keep getting surprised with new issues and new problems right I think it's a it's a recurring theme that you put in some checks and processes outsmart those checks and they come in with you know you have to keep evolving and keep adding in new and new things and maybe the technology needs to keep in I mean ideally if the technology was there then everything should have been perfected you would not you should not have seen anything also right because all of it would have been hidden off and cleaned off but unfortunately that's the sense I'm getting is that that's not the case. Arvind maybe let me let me take you to a slightly more difficult question. A lot of a lot of the panelists have been running on biddable and Google and Facebook are one of the biggest duopoly in the market and I'm sure you also run a lot of campaigns on Google and Facebook. I just want to broad base this do you think ad fraud is an affiliate only issue do you think ad fraud is also there on Google Facebook and I mean there have been a lot of media articles on how Google has been has been identified with a lot of bot running and YouTube was recently a year ago it was found that YouTube was actually billing on bot traffic have you faced something like that on your campaigns and what are you doing to prevent yourself against that because I'm sure as a just two more minutes I'm sure as a wallet share they actually have a very high wallet share right in terms of even though the absolute percentages might be lower the exposure when you multiply with the wallet share might actually be much higher right because you your bulk of your wallet will be going there so what's your what's your comment on that so so diraj taking the broadest view of ad fraud so to say some of the common challenges we face are viewability brand safety apart from you know the ad frauds that our performance campaigns kind of face so so the viewability itself I would say is a very very you know challenging tasks so to say across all our platforms though we have used third party platforms I think that's the best solution the best and sustainable solution I would say for for getting a single view and a comprehensive view of viewability otherwise viewability across platforms are inconsistent and it doesn't give you a high level view but the second I would say is brand safety so so so in that sense you know there are ad fraud concerns across networks it is not restricted to affiliates and for example for brand safety being a global brand some of the family marketing as we call it campaigns we have to be extra careful that you know there are some categories that are excluded for example using dv360 so so so that we are on the right side of brand safety and even today there's a big discussion going on with Facebook globally as you have heard there are many brands that have kind of raised the issue with Facebook and we have one of those brands which have kind of raised this issue trying to solve it from a global perspective before we resume advertising and then of course coming to app install campaigns so click hijacking and the likes are very common and and admittedly they have been times in the past where affiliates form a significant chunk of our investment and you know one of the panelists alluded to it earlier and we have seen organic crashing many a time and then we have to kind of intervene and and though we use tools like apps flyer so so i would say that the issue of ad fraud is broad based across platforms the challenges in each other platform does vary and we have to kind of tackle it on a platform to platform or a objective to objective basis so for example like the panelists mentioned right some of the affiliates we everything is cost per order for us right in the end it's all about maximizing the ROI on on our orders for delivery orders so we do have that lens when we kind of do pay out we do have those controls but the challenge is quite immense so absolutely i mean you know it's always interesting to hear how you know organic for example is something which keeps dropping for a lot of people and or you know you tweak your campaign suddenly organic increase or decrease it's almost like magic right and for a lot of CMOs who come from traditional media for whom you know organic is more based on your brand loyalty and and you know brand penetration and word of mouth seeing organic go up and down so heavily like a spring seems to be like what the hell is happening right i i think it's a it's a it's a challenging proposition and and just spending two minutes on brand safety right and i i see very few performance marketeers talking about brand safety and and you know you are one of those which which raised on this so maybe i should not ask you but maybe i should ask poros right poros why why do performance marketeers don't consider brand safety in their mix generally we see this as a burden on brand marketeers and not on performance market in fact we see a lot of performance marketeers who don't even care about things like i mentioned that viewability or you know categories which are valid invalid and so on what's your sense on it um i think that's that's that's to do with the the construct of the company and the construct of the team i feel right now at z5 at least all of the creatives are all of the campaigns that go out are are a responsibility of my team so i think a lot of brand safety issues a lot of those concerns though they are kind of championed by another person or another team or another leader they come they come and they kind of go to the market through us so in a way i think now a lot of things are changing regarding that i think a lot of performance marketeers as well are held accountable for how and what they're doing and not only from an ROI point of view which we always had to kind of deal with but also from a viewability point of view right and in cases of brands which want to kind of make a name in the industry make a name just generally also i think like McDonald's like someone in the entertainment space as well it's very important that brand safety is kind of looked at and and kind of addressed by the performance campaigns and and the teams as well so i think that's that's a more of a thought process that that is going to be changing right now but i think definitely it's it's kind of coming down in the performance marketeers kitty now that you have to kind of look at that as well so thank you so much for your thoughts on that Parush by the way Arvind since you mentioned on brand safety and category blacklisting i do want to flag off that you know one of the issues which many of these blacklisting mechanisms face in terms of q and category is indian regional languages india has so many regional languages and while you know a lot of tools work out well for english and maybe a little bit for hindi when you go down the funnel then for example sms i don't know if you're aware but google for example it doesn't support even targeting on a regional language like at the inside so if you want to run a campaign on the sms language and say you know i want to only target those videos which are on that language you currently can't and if you can't target then obviously the brand safety a part of which is you know way down the line so i just wanted to flag up for all advertisers that this whole category keyword issue you know while globally for the western world definitely works because of english being the dominant language in india youtube about 70 to 80 percent of content consumed is local languages and that i think is an india specific issue which i think the english-based brand safety tools may not be supporting very well ankith when you're running app campaigns and you told me initially that you're running a lot of retargeting campaigns how do you solve for fraud on retargeting campaigns and and what are you measuring i mean retargeting campaigns fundamentally face the same issue like an acquisition campaign click hijacking organic stealing you know capturing your loyal organic users and just showing them as re-engaged so that you have good roas how are you protecting your re-engagement campaigns in the airport yeah i think that's a big question you know and not not only in india but i think it's a global globally there's a big question on how do you really really attribute or measure the success of your re-attribution campaign because you know so i think the only way we have currently i mean there is no genuine way to you know genuinely attribute that cost that we have but what we tend to do is we tend to do split tests between campaigns which are run with retargeting and one which are not run with retargeting and then we also we know the retargeting campaigns we try and just evaluate in terms of what platforms are bringing us but as of now except figuring out you know whether the you know whether the person has come beyond the window of that seven days that we have currently and has it you know come in with this retargeting campaign because the costs from retargeting seems to be seemingly low than what it is otherwise so yeah we're still figuring a way out to you know genuinely measure how effectively to see if there is fraud in retargeting yeah no absolutely because you know like we started if your cost is way too low when your ROAS is fantastic then most likely there's a problem there right so i think identifying the problem is the first step and then you know you can probably look for a solution on that but my understanding in terms of our analysis shows that retargeting is then is a wild wild west right now simply because a lot of campaigns run on cpc model and while you know acquisition campaigns have gone right down to as Gaurav mentioned right up to order and account opening retargeting campaigns are still mostly paid on cpc with maybe an aspect of ROAS built in as a metric or something right which means that for a lot of advertisers getting bad clicks is something which when mixed up with all the other clicks might actually just completely screw up and might impact their investments so Gaurav one question on you know on on on different aspects one of the aspects of you know performance marketing is incentivized campaigns and where you know we see a lot of incentivized properties where college students come in you know they get offers like you know do the same keep keep your app install the app keep it for seven days you know register and you know you will get 10 rupees right and you are effectively i mean your friends are effectively creating those incentive models right how do you solve against those because obviously those will be really bad in quality and and what are you doing to protect yourself against those things like those if you really ask me yes you rightly said so for example like i said if i put 100 rupees for some partner and i will pay 100 rupees for this what he will do is he will go to some platform like this and say i will give five rupees pay them cash back and suddenly you will see oh certainly the campaign is performing so well so first thing is campaign is performing very well there is some problem so you have to definitely look into it and it is more reactive approach if i tell you there is no proactive approach to it but there is a reactive approach to it then suddenly it will go to the sales team sales team will talk to them understand you get a lot of feedback right suddenly if it is a lot of let's say leads coming in from one source definitely you tend to get a lot of feedback from your sales team and people but to be very honest these are very very very reactive approach as i said wherever you put in your money the fraudster or somebody who wants to do some fraud is ready with some new idea or there are some i think these apps and these models are probably fueled by a marketer like us maybe let's say five percent of everybody who is spending in India goes to these apps and probably everybody is happy the student is happy the app is happy and marketer is losing out money but it is a reactive approach to be very very honest with you on that i think just to add you need to keep your eye on on youtube and on telegram these days so you know what i have personally done these days is whenever we have a referral campaign or something on our first day go in the morning and put out on youtube download any app and then you know you generally see these kind of people and you know they've done this also so i mean that's like just we actually had a public study here so maybe i can quote that for big basket they actually had a referral program and they face this problem called on google brand bidding where what happens is that people were bidding on big basket keywords on the google search obviously big basket keyword on google search will have the least cat right most people will be searching out of convenience clicking on it and going and converting very well so there were there were two issues we identified one was affiliates doing that especially on a cost per sale or a i've got a set of cost per account open kind of in a campaign you'll actually get a lot of your organic which was coming on google search you know get redirected by the way the side issue of this is that your google bid rates will go up so you'll actually pay more to google as well right you'll pay more for affiliates for conversion but you'll also pay for google as well and the second interesting thing uncle which you mentioned rightly was that there were people who were left with end customers who were actually taking the referral code and running a google ads campaign of promoting the referral code right and they were recommending people to use that referral code on check out on big basket so that they could they also get benefited out of that so very very interesting on how google search and brand keywords on google search can be misused by your end customers and your partners um and uh and more so in in terms of increasing of bid rates on google which actually can be a pretty heavy effect uh mr prabhakar um coming coming back to you so as a cmo and you know i i want to because you are the cmo on on this panel so i want to raise this question to you uh i'm sure the brand teams and performance teams both are reporting to you right now uh we just discussed how organic and very quickly shuffle around right so your brand team obviously would have its targets on organic word of mouth reach and making sure organic is there while your performance team might actually gain by stealing organic i mean if i am if i take a very very negative view a performance team might be happy getting organic stolen because that will take up the performance teams are away as a cmo uh which has both brand and performance teams reporting to you how do you solve for this dilemma how do you because obviously these are competing benchmarks brand team and performance teams are competing how do you how do you split this up because ad short can result in uh you know both the teams to fight over each other uh see um you know i think that's that sometimes is regarding the culture of the place you know and how do you kind of make your team come together you know so maybe earlier the brand team and performance marketing team used to work in silos but since i took over my view was that you know all of all of you are part of the same team and what i realized is i started having the content people brand people sit in the su meetings and the performance marketing people sit in the social media meetings which are under brand you know a lot of this camaraderie this collaboration started happening so today we track i'll tell you i mean this is very interesting couple of days back my brand team now reports that how much of organic traffic uh and also with the help of google campaign manager we're able to look at the assisted lead so we just don't do classic conversion but we also give credit for assisted lead so the social media team will track like what is the assisted lead how the trend has been increasing month by month by month and also traffic so last time saw we saw the data that social media team reporting was way too high then what was the case and they were like no we took the data from j only how is that possible then we went deeper into this and realized that the su su team is only taking traffic data for the main domain because they do not want to dilute their own parameters and also some of the newer campaigns which i started on social media uh some of those uh you know impressions and those traffic are also being measured by the brand team yeah yeah that that was the case so net at the point i want to make is that eventually as a marketing guys we have to balance it out because somewhere the efforts with brand team making youtube or ott campaign has a positive above and also what performance marketing team do because what we have seen any paid uh spend increase in uh usc campaign universal app campaign in mobile app we have seen the organic app also increasing so there is a linear correlation so somewhere and also i'll tell you one more thing so currently we are in top five in our category and we know that our history has made us very strong in period organic we can do better and we are creating new assets and we know our competition is far far stronger stronger in organic so nowadays with the help of similar web and all we actually track our traffic percent our traffic as a percentage of their traffic and we ensure that we are gaining in that also because then so then we we have a relative sense in terms of how we are performing these are with the market so that's how we manage it no thank you so much Mr. Tewari that was very interesting um Arvind do you think CMOs uh you know especially CMOs which come from traditional media understand things like VTAs, CTAs, attribution windows, inactivity timers and do you think uh you know uh performance marketing is sorry for all this but do you think performance marketing is taking advantage of the CMO in this case? Well can't rule that out i think it's a very steep learning curve for traditional marketeers but kudos to many of them who are making that transition who are you know absorbing these trends very fast are digitally savvy themselves but but frankly in a larger scope of things I would say this is a very small percentage of traditional CMOs who are successfully able to make the cut uh you know in brand meetings talk the language of brand and in performance marketing meetings switching that language right and having enough depth of knowledge uh to kind of get the best out of both uh so so uh so on the second part of your question you know performance marketeers who have let's say traditional CMOs uh so there is a misfit right that's a misfit and it's a loss for the organization uh and I really liked what Prabhakar was talking about how to treat all of this as a whole and that's what we also do uh look at digital seamlessly rather than even though there is a brand function and a performance marketing function I and we kind of bring it bring to aim it to aim to bring it together uh you know so so it's a it's a ongoing process Diraj and generally speaking I can see a lot more traditional marketeers making those transition which is very good which is very good but I think there is a you know a huge case like a keep telling young students and and you know professionals early in their career that there's a huge demand for digital professionals who can talk both brand and performance seamlessly no absolutely uh I mean uh you know just constructing it for the audience performance marketing you can actually change some of the measurement criteria and by simply changing some parameters you can actually show fantastic performance and by just setting them too high or too low uh you might actually cannibalize on your own brand campaigns or your organic campaign and a lot of CMOs need to be aware that how you how a performance marketing can very heavily work on both ways depending on how you are setting your your setup up right a very simple example is should you bid on your brand keywords or not right uh a performance marketer will say you know absolutely a brand keyword why not you know we should bid on it uh while you know effectively one way to look at it is that you might actually be cannibalizing on your own organic because people who are searching for Tim McDonald are most likely already going to convert right so you're effectively uh spending money to jack up your performance on your search campaign while you know the and I'm sure there are different reasons for it I'm not uh putting that this is the only answer but I'm just saying that some as simple decision like this can you know change the metrics of brand and performance games um uh I mean just continuing one more topic which I talked about that's about um on on google search we talked about how brand bidding can happen where partners affiliate uh your uh can can bid on brand keyword how are you following following for that because that can have the impact on your bid rates on google uh you know to shoot up and that can probably uh end up you know screwing up your ROI or your optimization of your search engine campaign yeah so uh in in fact our problem is wider right so there are many uh for example food delivery apps which also you know kind of bid on our our keyword so so so it's a it's a real problem we tried dealing with it in a few simplistic ways we didn't get very far so so and now the problem is quite acute because the demand has shrunk uh and uh and everyone is kind of going after this shrunken market uh and uh and you know don't have numbers to code but uh we know that ad fraud is way higher than what it was pre-covid uh but the good news is that solutions to all of these problems exist all right uh through analytics and through tools uh and there is a emerging space of both I think one needs to ask these questions uh and try out those solutions so so we are working very closely with some of our partners we aim to try out a few of those tools uh that that kind of make sure that we're spending the money right money in the right place so otherwise you know we don't know where our money is going and we are happy with our overall cost per order you know within the zone but when you double click on it you realize that you know there's a lot going on behind it so so so I think you know uh so we are you know traveling that uh that journey and making sure that we are working with a lot of tools I'll be done an experimental basis before we kind of uh zoom on zoom on and what we want to do as a as a way of working absolutely Polish any any finishing points on your side we are roughly out of time but I just want to take your sense on on your on what I've been said about asking questions and what's your thought on ad fraud in general for his b5 uh yeah so ad fraud like I think so everyone mentioned over here right it is something that people are having to deal with and have dealt with for the for the longest time uh the fraudsters are becoming smarter just just as the marketers are getting as much information about everyone uh it's it's just that to be one step ahead of the fraudsters we have to keep on evolving just as uh just as our campaigns are uh evolving on a on a quarter on quarter year on your basis uh we have to not be too happy if if things are going very good for us and always keep an eye on the bigger picture right I mean your overall funnel needs to keep improving if if only a performance marketing campaigns are doing very good or if you're getting your ROI very low but your actual revenue is not increasing ROI is not improving I think that's that's what you need to keep an eye on and uh and yeah that's that's how we kind of manage this over a period of time no I think this is a good point to you know kind of just summarize I think asking questions I think that's what I take away Arvind thank you so much for that I think if you ask questions you actually then start pointing towards finding solutions and the sense I get is that there are a lot of questions uh you know which which were there which are issues which the panelists are dealing with in different ways some with tech some with manual some with you know looking at end metrics only or payout models I think a lot of of this is now available as tech advertisers have the capability of getting solutions and not depend on manual exercises or their own efforts they can actually focus more on the actual campaign rather than focusing on things like those but I think it all starts with asking questions so I think I want to you know kind of summarize on that Rohil we are yes thank you so much yes wonderful discussion very insightful points raised and we have a whole lot of questions I have just put together some of them in the interest of time so this is open to all of you anyone can answer it so the first question is from Tushar Divan the question is I am using GA to measure my web campaigns and GA has protection against bots and I pay only on actual sale can I assume I am safe from adfrot I think I covered that one partially though and and for which maybe you can comment on it because you're using GA for your web but very briefly absolutely not GA doesn't protect you from bots you what GA gives you as an option is only to remove known bots the good bots from your calculation and the owners of fraud actually lies on you for maybe you could spend two minutes on that no exactly so that's that's exactly what what it is you can give an example of how we detect fraud on the website right so let's say we're running campaigns for a person and and we will pay we will pay only we'll pay an affiliate only when the person views five video views on our platform a bot can a person who wants to do fraud they can actually just come and integrate their click just before just before the person comes on board and says that this organic person is is is actually coming from affiliate affiliate one or affiliate two or affiliate three right and after that whatever the person does on your platform it's it's all attributed down down the funnel to this particular affiliate one two all three so no you have to you have to be very vigilant you have to either use a partner or tool to kind of help you understand how how to kind of deal with bots or you need to have a very strong data science team and keep asking questions within team on how your actual performance is happening and what you're seeing are you seeing any incrementality by doing affiliate one two or three or if and when you stop campaigns from affiliate one are you even seeing a drop in users or drop in video views or not in our case so yeah to answer your question doesn't you you can't assume that you're safe and you have to you have to keep checking on that for sure right in fact just one foot for thought for two minutes on that I don't know if if you know you're aware if you inspect the page if you go to chrome and you inspect the page you can actually read the gf pixel on any website copy that put it on any random website and open that website a thousand times in all those thousand visits will get tracked on the actual gf GA analysis of the advertiser which means that GA is very very easy to spoof and you can actually trigger GA a thousand times million times without opening the webpage itself right so now remember that and I and definitely keep asking questions okay yeah there is another question for specific to our friend which is I would like to ask that McDonald's had done gone through a crisis after that the company removed many items from the menu was it difficult to reach the remark was it difficult to remarket the brand and products how did you how do did you deal with ad fraud on email list looks like two questions into one two questions right uh McDonald's at least to my knowledge McDonald's doesn't have a big problem with the fake email lists in that sense so maybe some other panelists can take that so yes on the first part as you know the last four five months has been both the supply crisis and the demand crisis so so we have to kind of approach the whole situation with the with the focused menu as we call it with the so that and then slowly over time we kind of reintroduced all the favorites back onto the menu we did receive complaints from customers and and but we do have a reasonably good CRM tool so that we could let customers know whoever has complained about this product not being off available let's say a month later it's made available we do reach out to those customers and and let them know about about it so so it is something that we have been dealing with but but largely we are out of that of out of that situation which was there about for about 90 days uh so on the second question of fake email list maybe some other panelists can take it diraj you want to go to go to i think lead campaigns would have a lot of email list issues what's your thoughts on that see so lead campaigns have so for example again i said if you're working with affiliate probably uh you don't pay for email so you need not to be worried worried you need to be worried about what you're paying for so first golden rule is you see to be worried about what that contract is all about on what you are paying the money if whatever you are paying the money for the fraud will happen on that front right or for example there's a lot of database organization has i'm just talking about generally and if you see there is a lot of fake emails the emails people don't open they're not fake emails god of s10 emails but he is active on one email and probably doesn't open other 10 so there are a lot of email service provider if you're using a good service provider who has a good network he can if you scrub your data against that data he has you will get a valid email ideas good idea valid email ideas what are there but that is again not 100 proof but you will get some sense out of it and then probably you can also map it to the from the source which is coming and that's how the i think email thing could be tackled i just want to take some more questions there are questions one is again for everyone it is from bari malki how much duration is good to find about the fraud in the campaign what is the duration in that you can figure out the fraud is there so my sense is that i think it depends on the campaign and the size of the campaign obviously if the size is very very small you would not have enough data to you identify anything out of it if the size is large then even a few hours is good enough for you to get a sense of making the baseline and then start identifying what is good and bad and maybe training your models or identifying outliers etc so yeah i think it's more a function of volume rather than time in terms of you know finding what is the right benchmark for you to look at if you know that's my thought on it but anyone else wants to take that up so so dheeraj if i can add to it in my view i think it is also dependent on the product you are selling the product life cycle so how long is your sale cycle if your sale cycle is let's say average of 30 days so then 30 days only you will come to know that whether the fraud is happening or not or it is like immediately you want to download or maybe a app install then it may be a for a few days or if it is a beauty view because we also do a lot of v2b campaigns there the cycle is far more higher maybe six months after six months you may realize that okay this source of this partner has done the fraud no lead has converted and probably we were doing so much of a follow-up and so on so forth it is also dependent on the product and the the sale cycle and the brand right another question from upasana upadhyayi my partner's bid on my brand keywords and ended up increasing my bid rates on search what can i do about it anyone wants to take that i've talked about it so i don't want to answer that Porush have you faced this issue do you want to talk about it i think my partner's upasana i think she means competitors right yeah i think it could also be affiliated anyone i think not necessarily competition only for mcdonald's it could be like you know food this delivery totally totally totally yeah so even if you want to take it specifically for mcdonald's but yeah i think what we can do when when our partners or our competitors are bidding on our brand keywords is from an organic side be very strong in terms of whatever content you have or how you build your brand presence have have enough material to kind of support your own brand on that i think that is one thing that that from a branding point of view it is very important to have a good presence over there also just just be in the race for as long as you can right i mean if you are being let's say five rupees for a click on on your brand or one rupee for a click on your brand this this other partner or competitor as such would have to do at least two three four five times right so if not enough people will have enough money to burn to kind of keep on doing that to you so just stay in the game for long enough and you can see them yeah right by the way sorry just to follow up on that poros have you seen cases where your competition ran up your search budget we keep we keep hearing you know scare stories where you know people say that my competition came ran out all my budget in the first hour of the day and you know on google search and there was no protection which came from the platform so have you faced something like that and what are you doing about it yeah so we had so interestingly about about almost about half a year back we were launching our campaign in ua in middle east at the same time one of our competitors are also long launching in the same region an indian competitor was launching over there and they had much more deeper pockets than us so yes they they kind of and ztv as such is very well known across the globe especially in the india wherever we have a lot of indians right so we did face that issue but like i said it was an issue which was kind of hampering my performance kind of hampering the kpis that we were looking at the cost for users the cost for subscriptions that we were seeing in that particular period for a month for a quarter was looking bad but what we tried in total management is just the same thing that i'm that i'm saying right now right the learning is that you have to stay in the game if if you are facing the brunt of this your competitor is definitely facing a much much steeper challenge and hence they're trying to do this to you your competitors only paying about two three four times like i said to get a user who's actually saying i want to come to z5 and then also may or may not get the user from there right so if you can and if budgets and if you can kind of ask management and budgets can be made available you should kind of stick stick the guns on on that one yeah and diraj especially if you have VC funded competition who don't have the pressure of quarter to quarter pay and else it's a real real challenge but i think the platform allows that right the platform allows that in fact if you go to the platform they'll tell you to run a ad on youtube which directs people back to google search and then bid on google bid on your brand keywords there so that's the challenge of the platform i think and actually no actually i want to just direct attention i mean for which i think what you mentioned was more on competitive basically competition also bidding on your keywords and you and your competition both fighting each other but i think another issue which we see is competition actually consciously is running bots and clicking on your ads so that your click budget gets exhausted so your campaigns then you know your daily cap gets exhausted so your campaign disappears and then their campaign can run for the rest of the day right in fact so we've actually rolled out some a lot of solutions on google and facebook fraud analysis where we can go and blacklist in real time ip placements which are generating bot traffic so that your budget don't get you know eaten up by your competition because competition can just come in keep clicking on your ads thousand times and your daily budget is gone and then their ad can run at a much lower cost with no competition for the rest of the day so yeah i have one one final question yes one final question is name is not given that thank you for this wonderful discussion on rica targeting fraud if we target very specific audiences what the scope for ad fraud be lower uncle you had talked about retouching you want to take this up the chances are definitely lower if you're if you have your own databases and if you're running your own campaigns so we have we have definitely seen that campaigns that we run in house which means a lot of data specifically database campaigns we see we see definitely better conversion rates and better ROI on those because obviously it is more managed as a campaign but you know if your data is only incorrect or if your data base quality has been generated by by a campaign which had so much of fraud already so then obviously you will not be able to hamper but definitely you will be able to derive more value in terms of more learnings in terms of what you should be doing as step two great thank you so much we are out of time and it's been a great discussion i'm sure it merits more such discussions because it is a huge task task to control in ad fraud which is going by the day but thank you for this wonderful conversation and any last words from you diraj i think thank you so much i think i just end with that same button asking questions is the start when you identify the problem you've solved half the puzzle and that will actually allow you to find tools technology solutions processes both internally and externally to solve this problem i think the only way to solve at fraud is to cut down the revenue in terms of the money flowing to the fraudsters if the money flowing to fraudsters gets cut down that's when the incentive to do fraud gets off and you can actually safeguard your campaigns i so i think that's the focus for everyone how to cut down the money flow to fraudsters thank you gentlemen once again and hopefully see you soon thank you for your time thank you thank you thank you thank you take care everyone stay safe