Protecting Your Digital Ads, Campaigns, and Brands During the Holiday Buying Season

In India, like anywhere else, the holiday season presents an unparalleled opportunity for marketers to strengthen their brand with existing customers and attract new customers. With deals, discounts, and offers spread over two to three months, one can see the entire spectrum of digital advertising at work and its impact on consumers. For example, Integral Ad Science (IAS) recently released research on digital advertising during the festive season and found that 85% of Indian consumers will do most or all of their shopping online; 97% of Indian consumers find online advertising helpful in finding products and promotions.

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While marketers focus on optimizing their digital campaigns to maximize their ad spending, fraudsters will notoriously follow the money. To help protect advertisers from ad fraud, brand risk, and false viewability metrics, IAS has developed cutting-edge solutions. As we look to make the internet a safe place for advertisers, let’s look at a few advertising pitfalls marketers can avoid during the festive season to protect their digital ads, campaigns, and brands:

Ad fraud is on the Rise Globally

Globally, ad fraud rates rose 10 times faster for campaigns that ran without anti-fraud protection (i.e. non-optimised), according to IAS’ 17th Edition of the Media Quality Report (MQR).

In India, however, advertisers working with IAS could mitigate ad fraud and maintain a stable YoY metric. In contrast, ad fraud rates rose universally across advertising on desktop display, desktop video, mobile web display, and mobile web video. To provide context, a new Juniper Research study has found that the value of digital advertising spends lost to fraud will reach $68 billion globally in 2022, rising from $59 billion in 2021.

Marketers can no longer solely rely on monitoring technologies to effectively mitigate ad fraud. Using blocking technologies is the need of the hour. Working with a verification partner such as IAS becomes essential to help marketers maximize impact and create outcomes without worrying about ad spending going to ad fraudsters.

Adoption of Context-Based Strategies Help Prevent Brand Risk in India

As the digital advertising industry pivots to first-party data targeting, context-based strategies evolve, thus helping to counteract brand risk. Context-based strategies allow ad buyers and sellers to avoid misinformation with minimal impact on reach. While advertisers go all-in on digital advertising during the festive season, it is important to note that globally, India is one of the markets that reported the highest numbers regarding brand risk, i.e., advertising alongside irrelevant/ negative content.

Analyzing brand risk closely, in India, digital ads placed next to violence, offensive language, controversial content, and illegal downloads posed the greatest threat to brand risk.Adopting context-based strategies will help marketers lay a solid foundation as we walk towards a cookieless world of advertising to protect your brand from being advertised next to unsuitable content. According to IAS’ Ad Context & Attention research released earlier in the year, contextual targeting strategies yield more substantial consumer attention, significantly boosting brand favorability and consumer purchase intent.

Tapping into Quality Inventory

As OTT platforms continue to dominate viewership, we will witness a rise in the number of cord-cutters. Video inventory is in high demand because of the trend above and the prominence of advertising on Connected TV (CTV). As a marketer, the very first thing you can do to win valuable inventory leading up to Diwali, is to increase your bid price. Focusing on the video to drive effective, meaningful engagements and increase engagement through mobile devices will be key. Working with trusted partners and marketplaces that provide quality will help marketers make the most of their campaigns.

When it comes to optimizing digital advertising campaigns, marketers need to make a note of factors that hurt their campaigns and adopt effective strategies. This begins by ensuring your ads are seen in fraud-free, brand-safe, and suitable environments.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]