“To a large extent, advertisers still lack confidence in their digital investments”

‘We are in the business of trust,’ says the opening screen of DoubleVerify’s website. The company, which forayed into India last year, is driven by a mission – to build a better advertising industry. DoubleVerify helps brands to improve the effectiveness of their online advertising, giving them clarity and confidence in their digital investment. Confidence is built on trust. Trust is achieved when a company’s mission, team and actions are aligned – doing things for the right reasons, with transparency and authenticity. With the consumption of digital on the rise and growing exponentially there is a deep concern on the issues of measurement, transparency and accountability as they are becoming a bit complex.

For advertising to make an impact, ads must be seen, by a real person, in a brand safe environment, in the intended geography. This is where the solution provided by DV ensures that ads meet these quality criteria, across channels, formats, and platforms – giving their customers clarity and confidence in their digital investments.

In an exclusive conversation with Adgully, Nachiket Deole, Head of Sales – India, DoubleVerify, speaks about the company’s experience in building digital transparency and trust, protecting brand reputation and driving performance.

One of the key missions of DoubleVerify is to provide trust to brands and clients. Could you please elaborate the trust factor and how does this benefit brands on a continuous basis?

With many stay-at-home orders in place over the past year, content consumption on digital platforms has grown exponentially. Not surprisingly, many advertisers continue to invest a sizable amount of their budget on digital media. However, while budgets are increasing, issues of measurement, transparency and accountability are becoming more complex.

Advertisers don’t know who to believe, and with continued fragmentation within the supply chain – and everyone wanting a cut – it becomes harder to address this problem. To a large extent, advertisers still lack confidence in their digital investments, and confidence is built on trust. For advertising to make an impact, ads must be seen, by a real person, in a brand safe environment, in the intended geography. Our solution ensures that ads meet these quality criteria, across channels, formats, and platforms – giving our customers clarity and confidence in their digital investments.

Secondly, for advertisers, building trust with their consumers is of paramount importance. This journey begins with the very first interaction or exposure a consumer has to a brand. Research from DoubleVerify and Harris Poll found that nearly 90% of consumers feel that brands bear responsibility for ensuring their ads run beside content that is safe, and two-thirds (65%) of consumers would be likely to stop using the brand or product if they viewed the brand’s digital advertising beside false, objectionable, or inflammatory content. DV has over a decade of experience building digital transparency and trust – protecting brand reputation and driving performance.

Media quality matters a lot. What are best practices that you follow to ensure brand safety for advertisers?

We need to look at media quality holistically, along with its components such as the context an ad is served, whether it was served to a real human, if it had the opportunity to be viewed and if it was presented to a consumer in the campaign’s intended geography. These are the building blocks of media quality.

One of the most complex among these is brand safety/ suitability. The content alongside which your brand ad appears can directly impact the perception of your brand. Think about this: what if you saw an ad for alcohol alongside an ad talking about the dangers of binge drinking? Wouldn’t this seem in poor taste? With the volume and variety of content available on digital media today, brands are always at risk of being aligned with unsuitable content. Brands need strategies to protect their reputations from the complex and dynamic digital environment – including everything from egregious topics such as inflammatory rhetoric and fake news, to topics that simply do not align with the values your brand wishes to convey.

Here are some of our recommendations:

• Understand and establish clear brand suitability guidelines.
• Constantly ask key questions such as, “Is there specific content that our brand would want to avoid?”
• Leverage and recognise the purpose of each brand safety and suitability control at your disposal to refine your strategy – from category avoidance to inclusion and exclusion lists.
• Adopt comprehensive solutions to protect the brand from real-time events and controversial breaking news stories.
• Don't avoid all news content. Instead, work with trusted news sources containing content that aligns with your brand’s values.
• Work closely and communicate with verification providers that will support unique suitability preferences.

With the rapid transition to digital, the India digital ecosystem has changed over a period of time. Under this situation, how is one able to work together with brands to bring trust and transparency?

Trust and transparency have always been a challenge with digital media. Multiple platforms, formats, and walled gardens further increase the complexity. However, with increased focus and investment in digital, advertisers are demanding more accountability. Working with a third-party independent measurement company helps advertisers gain insights that were not available to them before. Advertisers now can see where all their digital media inventory is delivered, the context it is served alongside, and clear ways to optimise quality and performance. This will help build more confidence, which, in turn, will bring more trust and transparency.

India is a multilingual state with diverse culture and language. What has been your strategy to address the large language population who today are actively engaged online when it comes to brand safety and performance?

At DV, we understand the importance of supporting brands in their journey to tap on non-English speaking audiences. We support keyword management and inclusion, and exclusion lists in every major language in the world. In addition to that, we support contextual domain and page-level content classification in Hindi, Bengali, Urdu and Tamil and we are working on adding more Indian languages.

Finally, we allow for language targeting and avoidance (targeting/ avoiding content written in a specific language) across all major languages in the world including a large number in India. We are always expanding our language capabilities and continue to invest over time in the development of our classifications in new languages.

What are the challenges and opportunities that your company is facing in the Indian market? Which sectors have shown great interest and how do you plan to increase the canvas to include more sectors and brands?

When it comes to digital advertising, the issues of viewability, ad fraud and brand safety have only grown more vital and complex in India’s advertising ecosystem. During the pandemic, brands have further sharpened their focus on digital and demand for sophisticated ways to measure return on investment. While brands and agencies realise the underlying challenges of digital advertising, the understanding of ad verification tools is still nascent.

Sectors like CPG, automotive, telecommunications, consumer electronics, e-commerce and BFSI will heavily leverage ad-tech solutions and drive the industry’s growth in the coming years.

Finally, with our expansion into the Indian market last year, we are now able to make changes on the ground by working with industry associations and publications to generate awareness and encourage the adoption of ad verification services – with the ultimate goal of making the digital advertising ecosystem stronger, safer, and more secure.