India reports 36% reduction in ad frauds due to verification tools: DoubleVerify survey

New Delhi: DoubleVerify ("DV") released its DV Global Insights: 2024 Trends Report. This comprehensive analysis draws on more than one trillion video and display impressions delivered across APAC, EMEA, LATAM, and North America, from January to December 2023, including desktop, mobile web, mobile app, and connected TV (CTV). The study also incorporates a global survey conducted by Sapio, polling 1,000 advertisers across these regions.

The report highlights the growing importance of addressing advertising fraud in India. Notably, fraud rates in India have decreased by 36% due to the increased adoption of verification tools. Despite this progress, fraudulent activities remain a significant challenge as new schemes continue to emerge. 

In 2023, DV’s research revealed a 23% surge globally in new fraud schemes and variants compared to the previous year, according to the DV Fraud Lab. 

Moreover, unprotected advertisers globally experienced a fraud/SIVT (Sophisticated Invalid Traffic) violation rate as high as 17%. These violations include incidents of bot fraud, site fraud, app fraud, hijacked devices, nonhuman data centre traffic, and injected ad events, all of which illegitimately inflate online advertising impressions or data events to generate revenue.

This year's report explores how media buyers are approaching key trends, including AI, attention measurement, emerging media, and made-for-advertising (MFA) sites. Additionally, it provides data on the region's performance regarding attention, brand safety and suitability, fraud, and viewability. 

Here is a summary of the key findings.

• In APAC, 60% of marketers think Al-driven campaign optimisation will have the most significant positive impact on media quality.

• More than half (58%) of APAC marketers spend over 20% of their workweek manually optimising digital media campaigns.

• 54% of marketers in APAC said that emerging channels have a significant negative impact on media quality.

Regional Insights from the Report (APAC and India):

• The APAC region drives the highest overall attention with an average Attention Index of 124, with India performing exactly at regional benchmark.

• While brand suitability violations are declining across APAC, India experienced a 3% decrease.

• In the APAC region, navigating brand safety during elections is tough, with 56% of media buyers concerned about political news cycles. Inflammatory Politics and News content doubled before the 2022 Indian Presidential election, peaking at 860% above the year-to-date average, two days before the nomination deadline.

• Despite an 85% decrease in CTV Fraud Rate, CTV remains the device with the highest Fraud Rate in APAC.

• Media buying is still concentrated heavily on mobile channels in APAC, which represent over 70% of total impressions for the region.

• The Video Viewable Rate in India increased by 19%, reaching 79%, which is above the global average of 71%. India's Display viewable Rate (70%) also witnessed an upward trend, increasing 3% from last year.

The DV Global Insights series further explored other industry topics, including the significant role of AI in transforming media and advertising. It delves into Gen AI, highlighting the challenges it presents in terms of ad fraud and MFA impressions. In fact, DV's latest analysis indicates a 19% year-over-year increase in MFA impression volume globally for 2023. 

Additionally, the report sheds light on media quality in Retail Media Networks (RMNs). DV’s findings reveal that RMNs over-index globally for media quality in terms of brand suitability and ad fraud, with fraud rates nearly one-third (31%) lower than the DV overall fraud benchmark and brand suitability violations 10% lower than the DV overall brand suitability benchmark globally.