‘You’re not really buying media on programmatic, you’re buying audiences’

The first edition of the e4m Real Time Programmatic Conference and Awards, held last week at the Jio World Convention Centre in Mumbai, was a celebration of all the creative and innovative work being done in programmatic advertising. While the award winners include some of the leading names in their respective fields, the conference included a variety of sessions centered around the power of programmatic.

Nachiket Deole, Head of Sales - India, DoubleVerify and Anil Pandit, SVP, Lead-Precision (Programmatic), India, Publicis Media held an engaging fireside chat on 'Building trust and transparency in your programmatic campaigns'.

Comparing the time when programmatic was first introduced to India a few years ago to now, where it makes up to 50% of budgets, Deole noted that the role of programmatic will only grow. Advertisers and their agencies, he remarked, always had conversations around where their ads were being watched and by whom, and programmatic has gone a long way in answering that question.

“You’re not really buying media on programmatic, you’re buying audiences, and that’s the real question. As an advertiser, you’ll always want to know where and how your ads are running so that you’re ensured that your ads aren’t running on some unwanted platform and or are not being shown to bots,” said Deole.

Mentioning that Pandit was quite the legend in the field, Deole asked the senior Publicis executive on what he thought the biggest challenges to programmatic advertising are. Answering that he thought programmatic was the best thing to have happened to the industry and alluded to an earlier statement by e4m Co-Founder Nawal Ahuja about different new channels coming into its fold, and spends on programmatic growing year on year.

“But, and there’s a big but here, we know that where there is money, there is fraud. And so fraud definitely tops the list of worries advertisers have today. This is followed by brand safety, brand suitability,” said Pandit, adding that brands were also consciously or subconsciously worried about funding misinformation.

He observed that while transparency and concerns about it had always been there, these conversations had picked up even more momentum of late. “There are various aspects of transparency. Here it might relate to transparency around supply chain pricing, or transparency around media quality: what are we buying, do we know what we are buying.”

These were some of the key concerns that Pandit said were occupying advertisers right now, and that programmatic had the tools to address these issues.

Both Deole and Pandit agreed that while there were already frameworks, ad verification partners and DSP-provided platforms which could address various transparency issues, fraud was still a major issue. “Frauds follow budgets; if your budgets are spending on more programmatic, there will be fraud in programmatic and if your budgets are spending on mobiles, fraud will come to mobiles, as is happening a lot now,” remarked Deole.

This is why, they stated, it was important for clients to be educated on all the malpractices as well as be aware of all the tools at their disposal to deal with any fraudulent or harmful activity.

“The future is all about data, and programmatic is a data enabler. The role of programmatic is only going to go up and so we need to educate clients and partners. Not knowing may leave you in a state of bliss, but you need to know what is happening with your content. So equip yourselves, learn about the tools you have, deploy them and go boldly ahead into a cookie-less future,” concluded Pandit.