Digital advertising remains central to modern marketing, but it continues to suffer from major inefficiencies—chief among them, fraud and fake engagement eating into media budgets, says Tejas Apte, Head of Media & Digital Marketing at Hindustan Unilever.Speaking to CNBC-TV18 at Goafest 2025, South Asia’s leading advertising and media festival, Apte said as much as 25-30% of digital ad impressions are wasted on non-human traffic such as bots.
“You’re told you’re getting 1,000 impressions, but almost 30% of those are being served to non-humans, essentially bots that can’t buy your products,” Apte explained. He added that in influencer marketing, the problem can be even worse, with fake followers inflating numbers by up to 75-80%, leading to little or no real business value.
He also pointed to the lack of transparency that many smaller or regional advertisers face. “While large, organised advertisers may have access to best practices via global markets or peers, many local and regional advertisers may not have that advantage,” he said. This gap prompted the Indian Society of Advertisers (ISA) to launch the Media Charter, which aims to make digital advertising safer, more transparent, and more effective for everyone in the ecosystem.
The Media Charter is built around four main principles: brand safety, viewability, fraud prevention, and ethical use of first-party consumer data. Apte said, “your ad should appear next to content that is deemed safe” and added that ads must be properly viewable—not hidden in corners of web pages that users never see. Fraud is still evolving, and older methods like “ad buffering” are still in play, where one impression gets falsely counted as multiple due to poor tracking.Consumer privacy is another growing concern. Apte warned about the consequences of misused data: “If consumers are not aware of what data is being collected, and if advertisers don’t have the confidence that the data they are accessing has been collected with consumer consent, it becomes a long-term problem.”He also raised concerns about the advertising industry’s dependence on input metrics like click-through rates (CTR), which often have little to do with actual outcomes. There’s a clear need to shift focus towards metrics that reflect real business results. “If someone clicks on an ad and goes to a site but still doesn’t buy the product or isn’t convinced by the product, then that click doesn’t mean much,” he said.Tackling these problems has required collaboration across the industry. The ISA Media Charter playbooks were developed with help from companies like Google, Meta, DoubleVerify, and mFilterIt. This joint effort has helped define clear standards for both advertisers and publishers and improve understanding around which metrics really matter.Finally, Apte acknowledged that while digital advertising has expanded rapidly, bringing measurement parity between digital and traditional TV is still a work in progress. “As TV and digital continue to coexist, and sometimes compete, I hope we can do something meaningful there,” he added.Watch the accompanying video for the full interview.
