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Are You Looking for Your Brand Keywords Manually?

Are you searching for your brand name and brand keywords on Google manually? Trying to find who is bidding on your keywords or trying to analyze your competitors and affiliates? Do you also ponder upon how your and your competitor’s ad is placed on the google search engine? Well, it is fairly common that your competition is using your brand keywords and is taking away a part of your organic traffic. In fact, your affiliates are also using your brand keywords to run your campaigns while charging a heap of money and end up stealing your organic traffic. But that’s not all, there is much more you could possibly lose, other than organic traffic loss, you’re significantly paying twice as much for acquiring a user and your bidding cost is hitting the sky which is further making your marketing budgets go for a toss. But, have you wondered why is it that you are paying twice for acquiring a user? You are already bidding on your keyword to acquire a user and when the affiliate uses your keyword to show an ad, the user lands on your website by clicking on an affiliate’s ad with your brand keyword, you are then paying your affiliate again for the same user. Why is your bidding cost hitting the sky? It’s not just you bidding on your brand keywords, your competitors and affiliates are also sailing in the same boat and bidding on your brand keywords, which in return is making your campaign budgets bleed dollars. Save yourself time and money – You could simply solve this Today in the world of ML, AI, and IOT, automation is the solution. You just need a course of action to track your keywords on different search engines and free yourself from the manual & half-cooked information. Brand Safety solution from mFilterIt has a ‘Search Abuse’ solution through which you can run through the ads of your competitors who are using your brand keywords. You can dive deeper into your competitor strategy by knowing their whereabouts, in terms of locations and time. This information helps you optimize your campaigns. This solution also gives you campaign insights that are being run by your affiliates, using your brand keywords. You can control your bidding cost by asking your affiliate to not use your keywords. Besides that, you could see the ad copy of the affiliate to have a look if the ad is conveying any misleading information about your brand. All of this requires no integration which means, the solution runs on its own to give you the information that will help you make better marketing strategies and control your keyword biding cost.

Are You Looking for Your Brand Keywords Manually? Read More »

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Facts That Brands Need to Know About Brand Safety and Affiliate Marketing Fraud

Affiliate marketing fraud can damage brand reputation, increase advertising costs and generate client chargebacks. The last few decades have witnessed a drastic evolution in affiliate marketing, for it has matured beyond what brands and marketers would have imagined in the past. It has become the most sought-after way to advertise the brand, generate traffic, and attract customers. Affiliate marketing has methodologically evolved as a sophisticated channel backed by intelligent analytics proving its value by acting as an omnipresent channel at all customer touchpoints. But being omnipresent has its unique set of challenges when we talk about brand safety and digital fraud. With the increase in affiliate marketing popularity, the chance of encountering fraudulent activity also increases, thus damaging the brand in many ways. The trouble comes when the affiliates’ actions are being paid for are fake, but real commissions are paid out to fraudsters. This drains the marketing budget and puts a brand reputation at risk by getting involved with wrong affiliates and hurts the overall campaign for a brand. Every brand needs to ensure that brand safety is the core tenet in their partnership with their affiliates. The reason is that the customers engage with the brand through partners, but they place their ultimate trust in the brand. The partner’s wrong positioning of the brand (luring customers on the pretext of fake coupons, redirecting to adult sites, stealing information) may damage the brand considerably. Monitoring and prevention of fraud, including affiliate fraud, should be the top priority for any brand. While brands have much to gain from the symbiotic relationships with their strategic partners, monitoring the same should be an always-on process employing both automated and manual action. The How Any affiliate link which leads a consumer to unseemly domains can misrepresent the brand in the wrong limelight. The brand reputation is at risk, but other consequences also arise in terms of excessive spending because fraudsters are gaming the system and cannibalizing other channel efforts. In some cases, the court ordered a brand to pay $12 million in restitution for indulging in affiliates who intentionally promoted their products on fake sites with false claims and free offers that never materialized for users. In many cases, counterfeit actions are generated by bots that direct a computer to another site, fill a form, or even purchase a product, mimicking human behavior. This is also called Click farm, another tool used by fraudsters in affiliate marketing. Brands take them as precious affiliate partners in today’s era of social media influencers. Little do they know that not all influencers are equal or accurate. Influencer fraud means that when fraudsters have inflated their numbers (followers, engagement numbers, etc.) to portray themselves as lucrative partners. They tend to charge high premiums for promotional ads, but the outcomes are not significant because their followers aren’t real. To conclude, the only of affiliate fraud prevention is early detection and stopping fraud before it causes significant damage. Investing in fraud solutions and tools helps bridge the gap and generate insights in real-time by validating affiliates and eliminating fraud.

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Burning the Ad Fraud Fat from Digital Advertising

mFilterIt’s Quick Guide for Marketers Ad fraud is just like bad fat in the body. It unnecessarily makes things look ‘healthy’. At the same time, it results in other lifestyle diseases just like obesity. To manage it and make sporty campaigns, here is a quick guide from mFilterIt based on excerpts of best practices implemented by it across some of the leading digital advertisers globally. Extremely good or bad performance are both indicators of ad fraud. Analyze the performance mix of the campaigns and get a deeper audit done if the results are too good to believe or too bad to absorb. There is no single medium that is fraud-free. Do not switch from one medium of advertising to another to combat fraud. Achieve higher integrity of ads within the existing mediums of engagement otherwise, there will always be a fresh learning curve to uphill. Ad fraud is not just about losing money. Similar to obesity, it results in other ailments like Brand Safety issues. Do monitor the placement of the ads and the relevancy of channels being engaged. The quality of the campaign is also to be monitored. Changing the model of engagement will again not result in tackling ad fraud. Irrespective of the model on which campaigns are running – CPC, CPCV, CPL, CPS, etc., fraudsters can trick ad fraud. In fact, the tougher the metrics to qualify, the higher the motivation to fraud. Engage with partners who understand ad fraud. Do not go by the disclaimer that there is no ad fraud through a particular partner. Evaluate if the partners are being checked and have ad-fraud specialists who are certified for it. Encourage your teams to understand ad fraud. Organize cross-team workshops for awareness of ad fraud as this impacts digital marketing function as well as other functions. It does have an impact on revenue, sales, procurement, and others as well. Check every element of an ad. Reassure yourself about the compliances and brand guidelines being followed by partners while designing ad-creatives, content, etc. Brand infringement is not only about wrong information about your business and products. It is also about selling fake/counterfeit products and services which could result in legal hassles for your brand. Watch out for any brand infringement in the digital space in real-time. Organic stealing not only makes you pay unnecessarily someone else hijacks the attribution. It also demotivates the internal digital team as their good work goes unnoticed. Track who is bidding on your brand keywords and diverting traffic through them. The above action points will help marketers to effectively manage and curtail ad fraud, brand safety challenges, and the growing brand infringement problems. However, strategically the best practice is to address ad fraud with an open mind rather than going with the hypothesis that no ad fraud to possible. This can then be audited and validated by a mix of home exercises and a professionally run ‘gym’ to burn the fat and have a sporty, strong, and good-looking campaign, which will fetch great results.

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Why Brand Safety is an Immediate Concern in India?

Brands have to repeatedly reach out to the same set of users, and they need to live up to their reputation to knock on the same doors again and again. The Indian broadband subscriber journey has been incredible over the past decade. By the end of 2020, India had over 747 million broadband subscribers over wireless and wired mediums as against a mere 10.92 million in December 2010. The threshold for defining broadband has also doubled from 256 KBPS to 512 KBPS. These broadband subscribers have become synonymous with Internet subscribers in India as narrowband technologies contribute insignificantly to the subscriber base. For digital marketers, it’s great news that our Internet users are increasing and at the same time have broadband access where they can consume a lot of content as well as immersive ads. So, not only textual simple ads can be served, but brands can serve video and other rich multimedia ads also. In 2016, when the widespread uptake of cellular broadband started in India after Jio commercially launched 4G LTE services, other operators like Airtel and Vodafone were pushed to quickly launch 4G services. We have seen many redefining moments in telecom since the entry of Jio. But what is a matter of concern is we are adding up new subscribers at a declining growth rate. For instance, in 2017 we added 54% new broadband subscribers while fell to 13% in 2020. This is expected behavior as we are achieving complete coverage of the population in India through digital services. For digital advertising, there is an important implication to understand. Somewhere, we are okay to have inefficiencies in digital campaigns. Generally, we would make a mass outreach and expect certain industry norms-based engagement rates. Many marketers are fine with 2-3% CTR, which means for every 100 people reached, we expect a tangible outcome only from 2-3 people. Now with this approach, we could afford the churn. Most likely, as 97-98% would not engage beyond a point, it would also hide the BOT engagement. Hence, ad fraud. Similarly, if anyone in the audience would not engage because of any brand safety issue, it would not make much of a difference earlier. The reason was, that there were still a lot of audiences available in subsequent campaigns with the overall digital user base growing in India. But now, this place is saturated, and we don’t have much room left to add more new users. This means every time a campaign would be served to more or less the same audience. In this case, achieving the highest degree of Brand Safety with campaigns becomes very important. This will ensure that the audience being served with campaigns does not form a wrong perception about the brand which will discourage and disinterest them from engaging in the future. Even though there is some degree of target marketing using digital mediums, a lot of it still happens through hit and trial and experimentation. This means a campaign manager has to reach out to the same profile many a time with different products and services to gauge the interest beyond as may be defined by key profile parameters. For instance, a specific audience profile might not be interested in a smartphone campaign but may be extremely interested in a TWS earbud campaign. While at the broader level, the campaign audience remains the same, the results of the campaign could differ remarkably. For such instances, an advertiser cannot afford to lose a user basis any distasteful experience that primarily results from a brand safety issue. With the potential digital users hitting a plateau, there is little chance for any advertiser to widen the reach beyond a certain point. It has to nurture its audience without fail and keep them receptive to its campaigns always. The relevancy of the campaign may go high or low depending on other factors that are not defined by the profile. What is important is that the advertiser’s message is received positively and engaged further by a potential buyer to decide accordingly. Advertisers and their agencies, have to realize the importance of brand safety, especially when a new addition to the digital user base is diminishing. They have to jointly ensure that the advertisement elements and the mediums through which they are delivered are brand-safe and do not result in an experience that pushes even a genuine user to discontinue the campaigns as its positioning is negatively impacted owing to brand safety issues like using an inappropriate keyword, insensitive messaging, false promise, or many such cases that panic a brand’s reputation. The digital user base in India will not grow as before giving any advertiser fewer opportunities to get new users to engage every time. They will have to nurture the same set of people and cannot afford to go wrong by creating a bad impression. Earlier, inefficiencies or wrongs in a campaign were offset by targeting a fresh set of users. Now every advertiser and its partner have to be mindful of nurturing the community in a very clean and pure environment. That’s the new hygiene!

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brand-safety

Data Safety: The Future of Brand Safety

We are living in a digitized era where trust and transparency have recently become the bone of contention, demanding an evolution in online protection. Advances in technology, internet penetration, and the proliferation of social media have revolutionized advertising and marketing, but also opened the door to a barrage of dangers. From ad fraud to counterfeit products to impersonation, they are all impacting market reputation, declining consumer trust, and hurting the bottom line. Marketers have been working hard to build brands in their consumers’ minds for it is the brand that ignites emotion and leads the consumer to make a decision. From brand awareness to brand protection, marketers and brands are now realizing the importance of taking care of the whole pie and not just a part of it. An extension to brand safety now is ‘data safety’ because brands are now at the risk of facing reputational damage if their customer’s data are not being used appropriately. Toxic data, the shadowy threat which stares right into the brand’s eyes and plans a kill in one stroke. The killer whale: Toxic data Toxic data is the data collected and used without the explicit consent of the consumer. Since time immemorial, the data-driven ad-tech industry has been tracking consumer behavior and collecting personal information without permission. Under the pretext of personalization and accurate targeting, the ad-tech industry today is marred by toxic data. But with changing times, consumers are evolving and are aware of data breaches, understanding data safety, and expect brands to respect their privacy and uphold the trust. The evolved consumer understands that their data is being stolen and when they are served with ads without being asked for permission, this leads to a decline in trust between the consumer and the brand, thus hurting a brand’s reputation. In countries like Europe where GDPR rules are stringent and in India where data privacy laws are being worked upon, it may be safe to say that stealing someone’s data without consent and permission is illegal? Now, is your brand safe if you are indulging in illegal activities? No chance in hell. The basic tenets of brand safety are making sure that the brand is not involved in fraudulent and criminal activities. Customer is king and they should have full control over the data they own and the choice of whether to experience digital advertisement. Not just consent, it should be a trusted and traceable path that does not hamper the relation of the brand with its consumers. Marketers and brands should carefully choose their ad-tech partners and publishers for transparent delivery of ads. Just like it is important to make sure that the ad is seen in a safe environment, it is imperative for brands to ensure that the data they use is safe for advertising purposes. Data safety ensures that the brand is safe from legal, reputational challenges.

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An Era of SMS Fraud

In an ever-evolving mobile communication ecosystem, text messaging has revolutionized the way in which people and businesses communicate. From a one-on-one communication perspective to a comprehensive mobile marketing platform for businesses, over 18 million texts are sent every minute, which keeps growing every day. The growing success of SMS (Short Message Service), MMS mobile marketing platforms has lured cybercriminals to take advantage of users and expand the SMS threat landscape. “Your bank accounts have been temporarily suspended. To unlock your card, click here-” The message captures the user’s attention immediately and an instant reaction will prompt them to click on the said link. Such messages are socially engineered attacks that are referred to as ‘Smishing’(SMS phishing), much like an email phishing attack, which tricks the user into providing information that benefits the fraudster. Despite having spam filters on mobile devices, such messages can bypass security walls to enter your device. “Congratulations! You’ve won a gift card worth Rs.2500 on a recent payment of your credit card. Click on the link to claim the reward” Such messages have a higher open rate as people are misguided into thinking that the sender is the bank and the prize being offered is legitimate (owing to rising online transactions in the wake of COVID-19). Given the nature of SMS, dangerous URLs are disguised as harmless web pages. In an era of one-click marketing where the goal is to garner response through a direct reply or clicking on a link to complete the survey and take home a coupon, fraudsters use it to their advantage using the same technique. Thus, the SMS threat landscape expands as users click the link without verifying the URL and sharing their information. In other instances, the text directs the victims to a website on the pretext of a small gift in exchange for survey participation. The website asks for credit/debit cards, personal details, or bank account numbers to cover the shipping charges, and the victim falls prey to such schemes’ by divulging the details without a second thought. The entire notion for fraudsters revolves around incentive-based fraud which rarely raises suspicious eyes. In a recent incident, fraudsters targeted PayPal users by sending SMS which said that their account had been ‘permanently limited’. In order to verify the account, the user had to log in using their PayPal credentials to get it up and running again following the link shared on the SMS. The webpage had all the elements of an authentic PayPal website, only with different URLs that went unnoticed by victims. Another payment processor, PayTm, has also been a victim of SMS fraud. All mobile marketing platforms and businesses are in a tough spot as such frauds are an inherent risk to their brand reputation and revenue streams. Protection against SMS fraud is an important element of not just brand safety but also an important application of mobile security and data protection. All such personalized messages, and branding content that looks legitimate can be a sign of SMS fraud. Fake branding is a scammer’s favorite weapon to trick people. It is important to have tools and measures in place to verify the authenticity of the texts and always be cautious before clicking on any unwanted link to keep trouble away.

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Top 5 Warning Signs of Ad-Fraud You Cannot Ignore!

Every business dedicates significant funds towards digital marketing campaigns for lead generation, awareness, and a great ROI. However, little do they notice that despite spending tons of money, earning thousands of impressions, it’s never enough. Sometimes, it’s not the inefficiencies or bad UI/UX of the website, a larger issue haunts the marketing department – Ad Fraud.   Studies estimate that a global loss from ad fraud in 2020 was $35billion and is estimated to cross $50 billion a year, by 2025. For businesses, marketers, advertisers, using an ad fraud detection solution aren’t a bone of contention anymore, it has now become imperative.   The question still stands, how do we ensure that businesses are bulletproof to ad fraud? The answer is Earth-shattering- YOU CANNOT. However, remaining vigilant to the warning signs of ad fraud can significantly lower digital spending and help businesses save more by spending less.   Top Warning Signs of Ad Fraud 1. Inflated Clicks Do not celebrate if you suddenly witness an exponential rise in click volume with a minimal to negligent change in conversions. More often, these repetitive clicks can be from the same IP address. There are chances that the clicks can be coming from areas that were outside your target audience. Say hello to bots disguised as humans.   Businesses need to ensure that they have traffic monitoring solutions in place along with other tracking solutions to analyze the lead origination and conversion. 2. Traffic vs Engagement A campaign’s effectiveness can be analyzed with the key metric being engagement.   Ad Campaigns help in driving traffic to a page but any traffic without significant engagement is a sign of ad fraud.   Monitoring solutions help advertisers analyze visitors’ engagement with content on a page, the time spent on the website, and other metrics which paints a better picture of the value being created by any campaign.   3. Drained Budget Red flag! Red flag! Red flag! Where did the money go?   When you have a drained budget and nothing to account it for, it’s clearly a sign of an ad fraud.   For instance, cases of ad fraud have become rampant in the music industry. Fraudsters are stealing chunks of money from music streaming services by setting up an artist account on a platform and uploading fake tracks. They then deploy a bot to stream those tracks on repeat, thus cutting the artists and producers out of profit.   4. Abandoned Shopping Carts More often than not, ad frauds are only looked at through the prism of impressions and clicks. But there’s always more to it. An unusual spike in abandoned carts is a sign of an ad-fraud. When there’s a large volume of incoming traffic onto a website (could be bot traffic), one may unknowingly block authentic purchasers (if there’s a viral moment of good marketing or any flash sale.   Keep a close check on all the abandoned carts. 5. An Unusual Trend There are times when advertisers fail to notice changes which are potential signs of ad fraud. Have you witnessed a drop in conversion rate but the ad spend remains constant? Or how about selecting a location as your target audience but a majority of the traffic witnessed from a location far beyond your imagination? Anytime a predictable spend is not performing or producing ROI, it should be a matter of concern.   All such nuances should be a subject of constant vigilance in digital advertising because just like technology, ad fraud is evolving at a grand scale. No business is immune from it, and it’s a costly problem that continues to grow.

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brand-infringement

Brand Infringement Increases the Risk of Account Takeover Fraud

Fraudsters create fake ‘look alike’ websites to capture data of subscribers/users to capture data for Account Takeover fraud. In a recent monitoring scan for one of the leading e-commerce portals, we found more than 30 fake websites (in this case marketplaces) created to fraud genuine subscribers/users which potentially increases the risk of Account Takeover fraud. This technique is increasingly becoming widespread where an ordinary digital user falls into the trap and hands over critical information to a scamster who misuses it. How does it work? A fake marketplace is created using exact elements of the genuine one making it difficult for an average digital user to make any distinction and become suspicious. The fake marketplace has the same logo, color scheme, fonts, listing style, and even the same product details to make a user believe that it is the authentic one. Since over 85% of users access the internet using a smartphone, the complete URL address is hidden as mobile browsers do not have space to show the complete link name. The fraudsters typo squatting the URL name so that a user is confused and there is nothing to doubt. After the fake marketplace opens in the browser, the user is allured to sign in or fill up a form to avail of great deals, enter into a competition, etc. The user taking things at face value enters the details and starts dreaming about the reward promised. Meanwhile, the fraudster celebrates by getting all the details which include password, mobile number, and other account information shared over this infringed identity. Now it can log into the genuine account and also change critical information like mobile number and email linked to the account. Now the account is completely in control of the fraudster who can buy products, possibly also use money in wallets linked to the account, redeem points earned, and much more. At times, especially in the case of OTT accounts, the fraudster can simply share the account details for other devices. All this would be happening in the name of a genuine customer, who will get no alert as all the mediums have been reconfigured. What does it result in? One can understand that due to Account Takeover fraud, the personal details of a genuine user are compromised, and the fraudster can ‘enjoy’ the benefits of a subscriber/user without becoming one. This is itself very damaging. But what does it translate into? Here are some of the implications of an account takeover fraud. First and foremost is the financial loss which can happen in many ways to both the parties – subscribers as well as the marketplace/platform offering services and products. The subscribers’ existing balances could be used to make purchases, etc. Nowadays, many platforms are offering a pay-later option. This would increase the liability of a user without actually buying anything. Hence, the transactions would turn out to be disputed where either or both the parties will lose money. The second major issue is a breach of trust and privacy. A user shares very crucial information including card details, passwords, etc., with a platform in all trust and faith. While the user is at fault for not perhaps being extra cautious, it’s primarily the duty of the platform that it doesn’t get infringed. The data could be abused as a scamster would get to know a lot about the behavior and profile of a user by checking the transaction history. Imagine someone buying an airline ticket for a particular city, and then receiving a call about being offered services while in that city. The user may feel excited that some AI-powered application is proactively offering the best of the experience. But it could be a scammer duping of money in the name of advance booking of any service typically required while traveling to another city. The marketplace will also face serious credibility and reputation issues resulting in paying subscribers signing off from it. Even a subscriber who may be spending just Rs 1,000 pm with the marketplace, would result in a substantial LTV loss by disengaging. This means a perpetual opportunity loss. As growth continues to drive from non-metro cities and towns which has been repeatedly shown as a trend by all major eCommerce marketplaces in the country, it is highly likely that the awareness about such issues will be next to negligible. This could be easily trapped by the fraudsters. Even the regulators cannot shy away by running very ineffective campaigns to increase awareness about such scams. The regulator and the cybercrime apparatus have also become effective and more proactive in their stance where such frauds become difficult to thrive. We have seen in cases like unauthorized card swipes, etc., banks do not take responsibility and shed off by excusing behind the awareness drives and ‘buyer beware’ principles. Brands (marketplaces) that are concerned for their reputation need to proactively create multiple layers of protection where brand infringement becomes almost impossible. This will result in users only engaging with the real platform where information exchange and transactions can be done without any worry. Are you unsure of any brand infringement case about your marketplace or other consumer-facing digital assets? Connect with us today and we will help you get the right picture.

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Is Smartphone Industry in India Ready for ATT Implications by Apple?

In India, we only have approximately 3% of iOS users. However, it is expected that Google will also eventually follow the pursuit taking away the monetization layer from the OEMs. ATT or App Tracking Transparency has already started nightmares in the advertising industry, especially performance marketing globally. The US, ME and other major markets of Apple have already become challenging for ad platforms and app publishers. In India, it’s not a big issue as we have a substantially lower iOS base with an overwhelming majority on Google Android. However, it’s not something that the smartphone OEM must ignore. The Centre of ATT implementation by Apple is that if a user doesn’t opt for tracking of a particular app, the app makers won’t be able to get a lot of information. It starts with IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers) and mandates that app makers cannot use other data such as web browser configurations and properties, user location, user network connection, among others which further reduces the risk of app fraud. This takes off the power of any app to uniquely identify a user, which means it cannot point to very targeted and personalized ads. While the privacy of a user remains at the core of this decision, it also allows Apple to ‘monopolies’ control over personalized advertising. Apple would not be dependent on app-level to get the personal attributes of a user. This will take the user journey back to Appstore giving Apple greater control over how it wants its user to discover content including apps. This means instead of apps being able to take advertising campaign calls directly, they will have to route through Apple. Globally, we are seeing a paradigm shift. Everyone in the value chain is realizing that sustainable monetization remains in advertising. So, whosoever, controls it makes the most out of it. For instance, airtel has also forayed into advertising recently. Though subscriptions for content are growing, they will hit a plateau very quickly, meaning expansion of the base beyond a point can only be through ad-supported content. This will change the way users are discovering content at the moment where OS doesn’t have much play. So, when a user gets into Netflix, iOS or Android doesn’t have any control over what content should be served. This also means they are blank about the ads that could be relevant. Google has mostly followed iOS in every possible journey. There is no doubt Android will also not bring in this change. It has already been enabling users to control permissions since Android 6.0. The more a user can define what to allow and whatnot, the lesser will be the visibility of an app about the user. The Indian smartphone ecosystem needs to act now. To create a system that can help them monetize through advertising and other services where personalization is the key, smartphone OEMs need to create a common currency, which strikes a balance between privacy and personalization. This cannot however be done by the OEMs alone. It must involve other partners, especially the chipset makers. Together they can create a system that can give control to the OEMs so that they aren’t able to lose the opportunity of personalized advertising. We all know how stressed the smartphone OEM industry is going financially. Even after being in the Indian market for over 6-7 years, many of them are yet to register profits. The rising competition, heavy marketing costs, unfavourable duty structure, increasing component cost, are all making the profit margins wafer-thin for the industry. It is very important for the incumbents like Samsung as well as young brands like Realme, and all in between, to leverage advertising opportunities. However, for this they shall have to prepare themselves, perhaps jointly, to be able to create a controlling, balanced mechanism that strikes a chord between privacy and personalization. Otherwise, they are going to be caught unaware when Google will also follow the path. It has already begun its cookie less endeavor, and, in all realistic probability, it will follow iOS in ATT as well. That will be catastrophic for the smartphone OEMs on Android, which other than Apple, everyone is. We at mFilterIt have come up with a framework on this issue that will give greater control to OEMs so that they become the most trusted partners in the advertising value chain and advertisers confidently and preferentially spend through them. While we have initiated the process, I will be very happy to discuss this with a larger smartphone OEM ecosystem. After all, we are committed to ‘Adding TRUST to digital’.

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