All modes of buying — impressions, clicks, conversions, views etc — are subject to fraud. There is SLVT or sophisticated invalid traffic. Advertisers have to use trusted third party tools to block all kinds of fraudulent inventory sources.

There are big content producers who are losing billions to pirate sites. In fact, pirate sites are earning money from advertisers in a way because ads end up showing on pirate sites as that is where they figure the audience is.

Digital fraud can be brought down to a single digit figure by brand safety companies. The technology exists to counter fraud

Programmatic has earned a bad reputation which is unfair. Automated buying is the logical way forward. Programmatic is about 10 per cent or less, but still there is fraud. Everything that can be bought programmatically will be. Advertisers have to learn to do it extremly well. In the US, after being talked about for years, programmatic finally realistically took two years to catch on. It will happen in India too. Publishers are probably worried about the yield from programmatic and so they hang on to what reserved media can offer to them. However, there will be a momentum that will tip the scale ultimately.

Publishers must respond to brand safety to get business from big brands.

Programmatic also adds several layers between the advertiser and the publisher. This empowers advertisers to be technologically efficient in reaching the audience. At the same time, it allows fraudsters to hide behind these several layers with very little risk of detection. However, it is incorrect to say all programmatic channels propagate fraud. There are reputed programmatic platforms that already have several tools to check fraudulent impressions such as MOAT, Double Verify and Forensiq.