Ad fraud has been accepted as a cost of doing business: Nipun Malik

As individuals become more independent, it becomes increasingly important for advertisers to employ new ideas and strategies in order to remain competitive. Consumers (and their ever-changing tastes) are growing more smart, demanding, discerning, and fussy as more firms battle to reach their target customers.

Advertising might be pricey if they want to get the attention of consumers. With such fierce competition in the market, entrepreneurs must work extra hard to create advertising that capture customers' attention and advertise in a way that best reflects their company’s mission. When companies run out of ideas for what to generate next, effective advertising relies on quick feedback loop procedures that adapt any changes in customer preferences – this is what propels innovation.

Sense Digital Media is one such firm that provides new advertising experiences that revolutionise the way businesses connect with people via desktop and mobile environments. Their platform combines one of the most extensive digital media reach and data sets with user-centric ad formats designed to increase engagement and activity.

In an exclusive conversation with Adgully, Nipun Malik, Co-founder & COO, Sense Digital, speaks about how the organisation is preparing for post-cookieless marketing tactics, preparations for client onboarding, and promotional and marketing activities.

What are the brand marketing strategies to boost lead generation?

Getting folks to come to your website is only half the battle won. You can spend months working on boosting website traffic, but without engaging offers, effective calls-to-action, and convincing lead nurturing campaigns, you won’t be able to convert that traffic into leads and, eventually, money. SEO and SEM should always be a key priority when it comes to boosting lead generation. What adds on as a benefit to the brand is keeping the audience engaged, and for this, the content needs to be relevant. A clear, well-defined call to action on the landing page will certainly assure much higher conversions. Creating leads isn’t enough for long-term revenue development, we also need to keep them engaged and recurring. Alternative traffic sources to lead generation and conversion are social media boosters such as Instagram Shoutouts, Contests, Twitter and LinkedIn. Several techniques directed at different stages are required for successful lead generation.

How should advertisers and brands prepare for the post-cookieless world? What are the challenges involved?

As the use of third-party cookie data diminishes, marketers must prepare for a future of consent-based advertising. As Google rewires its data rules, ad products, and capabilities against the backdrop of new privacy regulations and higher anti-trust dynamics, marketing professionals in charge of ad budgets, media mix, planning, and measurement will need to change strategies.

To best prepare for the changes that a cookie-free future will bring, marketing leaders would need to make substantial shifts in the media mix. One needs to reset measurement baselines, engage in market research, and lock in essential resources, from agency employees to publisher-direct deals, to prepare for an era of advertising experimentation. Increase Google, Facebook, and Amazon allocations, and anticipate to manage an increasing number of direct media sales with platforms and publishers – and fewer cross-publisher programmatic display – in the future.

What are the 5 emerging trends in brand marketing?

• The future of marketing and business will be more diverse, inclusive, and connected to real customer needs.
• Creating customer experience instead of just asking them to buy. This will ensure you have them for a lifetime.
• What meets the eye! Visual content and great storytelling.
• Personalised marketing messages that forge a real connection between the brand and the target market.
• It makes sense, then, that brands are turning to push notifications as a more effective way to capture customer attention.

What are Sense Digital’s key strengths? Who are your major clients?

Sense Digital delivers innovative advertising experiences that transform the way brands interact with the audiences through desktop and mobile environments. Our exclusive partnerships with global names like CNN and other preferred partnerships give us a lot of inroads and preferences within the advertising ecosystem. Simultaneously, our expertise in performance marketing helps us create a proposition which is awareness driven, while generating value to our clients. Our platform blends one of the largest digital media reach and data with user-centric ad formats intended to drive engagement and action. While working in the sector where the numbers count, there is a vast probability of fraudulence. We have our measures of fraud detection and believe in transparency for our clients.

Our key clients include – Lenovo, Nissan, Dyson, Airtel, Iqoo, HP, Agoda, Farfetch, Etihad, Singapore Airlines, ebay, etc.

What are your plans for onboarding clients as well as promotional and marketing activities?

Owing to a comprehensive exposure spanning over 7 years, Sense Digital has managed to carve its own niche in the ever-competitive world of advertising and marketing. The fact that our founding team is enriched with industry experts, bolstered by a cumulative experience of over 35 years, has further allowed us to transform the way our clients facilitate digital interactions with audiences. Our ability to disrupt the archaic nuances of the digital ecosystem and replacing them with innovative solutions has helped us create a robust on-ground physical presence, making Sense Digital one of the fastest-growing firms in the Indian digital arena.

On the promotional front, we have always been silent crusaders. The philosophy of letting your work do all the talking remains at the cornerstone of our company’s ideology and vision. While enabling brands, on the back of our creative solutions, to successfully negate the market challenges.

How are you focussing on brand marketing and helping in avoiding fraud? How is it impacting the marketing as well as advertising industry?

Ad fraud has been around for years, and many marketing managers have simply accepted it as a cost of doing business. Even if marketers know that something has to be done about ad fraud, they often feel like they don’t have the budget for it. Amongst pressure to grow ad revenues, it may seem like a better option to just spend more money on ad campaigns or hire advertising specialists – rather than investing in yet another SaaS tool.

At our end, our Ad Serving Platform, Datamaths, is integrated with third party brand safety tools and is robust enough to understand and  eliminate fraudulent or questionable traffic.

It is extremely important to stay agile and prioritise brand safety to survive and thrive in this industry. Campaigns are most likely to succeed – and brands are most likely to thrive – when advertisers have the time and resources they need to continuously monitor and optimize their advertising efforts. Through a combination of automated technology and manual monitoring, we conduct rigorous inventory cleansing to eliminate fraudulent or questionable traffic across our Web and Mobile Ecosystem.