As digital advertising continues to evolve, marketers are placing greater emphasis on transparency, accountability and measurable business outcomes. While independent third-party verification has long been an integral part of consumer digital advertising, B2B media measurement has lagged behind, relying largely on platform-reported metrics. However, this is beginning to change as advertisers increasingly seek unbiased validation of campaign quality and performance across rapidly expanding digital ecosystems.
Against this backdrop, MediaNews4U spoke with Samir Karpe, Country Manager – India, DoubleVerify, following the company’s recent expansion of independent post-bid measurement capabilities for the LinkedIn Audience Network. In this exclusive interaction, Kharge shares his perspective on why B2B advertising is entering a new era of measurement accountability, the growing sophistication of AI-driven ad fraud, the importance of combining pre-bid and post-bid verification, the rise of Connected TV (CTV), and how independent measurement is helping marketers maximise media quality, optimise investments and build greater trust across the digital advertising ecosystem.
Excerpts:
Q) Has B2B advertising finally reached its “measurement accountability” moment, similar to what consumer digital advertising experienced earlier?
Samir Karpe: In India, B2B advertising is certainly moving towards greater measurement accountability, but it still has some catching up to do compared to consumer digital advertising. Digital advertising overall continues to grow rapidly, driven by expanding content consumption, increasing digital platforms and larger advertising investments. However, independent third-party verification has not kept pace with this growth.
Consumer and D2C advertising have adopted independent verification much faster because of their scale, maturity and significantly larger digital investments. B2B advertising is following the same trajectory, albeit at a slower pace. The encouraging trend is that advertisers are increasingly demanding transparency, accountability and independent validation of campaign performance, making measurement a far more important part of B2B media planning than ever before.
Q) Why did independent, third-party verification take so long to penetrate B2B programmatic and how significant is DV’s new measurement offering in driving this change?
Samir: The pace of adoption has largely been driven by market maturity and investment levels. Consumer digital advertising reached scale much earlier, with significantly higher media spends moving from traditional to digital channels. As investments increased, advertisers naturally demanded independent verification to understand exactly where every advertising dollar was being spent.
At the same time, fraud has evolved dramatically. Today’s fraudsters are leveraging sophisticated technologies—including AI and Large Language Models (LLMs)—to create increasingly complex fraudulent environments.
DoubleVerify’s Fraud Lab recently exposed “AutoBait,” a network of over 200 AI-generated domains producing clickbait content designed to siphon advertising budgets. Since January 2026 alone, DoubleVerify has identified nearly 500 million AI-generated ad impressions running in low-quality environments.
Against this backdrop, DoubleVerify’s recent innovations represent a significant milestone for the industry. Over the past few weeks, the company has expanded verification capabilities across several high-growth environments, including Connected TV (CTV), Meta Threads, YouTube Audio and, most recently, the LinkedIn Audience Network.
In addition, DV has introduced DV Neura, its cognitive AI architecture that combines media intelligence, optimisation, verification and AI-powered workflow automation. Together, these innovations extend independent measurement into environments where advertisers are increasingly allocating budgets while ensuring greater transparency, accountability and optimisation throughout the campaign lifecycle.
Q) Are fraud and invalid-traffic patterns different in B2B campaigns compared to consumer advertising campaigns?
Samir: Fundamentally, fraud remains the same irrespective of whether the campaign is B2B or consumer-focused. The objective of fraud is always to divert advertising investments away from genuine human audiences towards invalid or automated traffic.
What has changed is the sophistication of fraud. Earlier, fraudulent activity could often be identified through abnormal traffic volumes originating from specific sources. Today, AI has significantly elevated the complexity of fraudulent operations. Networks like AutoBait use LLMs to automatically generate hundreds of deceptive content sites that closely resemble legitimate publishers, making detection substantially more difficult.
As commerce and media buying increasingly become AI-driven, new forms of fraud will inevitably emerge. The industry’s challenge is therefore not simply identifying fraud but continuously evolving verification technologies faster than fraudsters themselves.
Q) How should marketers balance reliance on platform-reported metrics with third-party verification when evaluating campaign success?
Samir: Platform reporting and independent verification should complement rather than compete with one another. In fact, many leading platforms actively support third-party verification because it helps improve transparency across the digital ecosystem.
Whenever differences arise between platform-reported metrics and independent measurement, they create an opportunity for deeper investigation into what is causing those variations. These discussions ultimately help platforms, verification providers and advertisers work together to eliminate poor-quality inventory and improve campaign performance.
The objective isn’t necessarily to find dramatic discrepancies. Instead, independent verification provides advertisers with an unbiased view of campaign quality, helping validate media investments while continuously improving transparency across the advertising supply chain.
Q) What hidden risks do advertisers face when scaling campaigns based solely on platform dashboards?
Samir: One of the biggest risks is optimising campaigns against proxy metrics rather than genuine business outcomes. Traditional platform dashboards often provide indicators such as click-through rates, view-through rates or cost metrics. While useful, these signals don’t always translate into meaningful business performance.
Consumer journeys today are increasingly non-linear. Discovery, consideration and purchase often happen simultaneously across multiple touchpoints. Optimising solely against platform metrics can therefore create significant inefficiencies if those metrics are disconnected from actual business objectives.
Modern optimisation should connect media performance directly with business outcomes by incorporating first-party sales data, analytics platforms and attribution signals. When optimisation is aligned to business KPIs instead of proxy metrics alone, advertisers can significantly reduce media wastage and make better investment decisions.
Q) How do pre-bid controls and post-bid verification complement each other in improving media quality and ROI?
Samir: Pre-bid and post-bid verification serve two distinct but complementary purposes.
Pre-bid controls act as a preventive mechanism by filtering out inventory that fails to meet an advertiser’s quality, fraud or brand suitability requirements before media is purchased.
Post-bid verification, on the other hand, validates where advertisements actually appeared and enables continuous optimisation after delivery. In today’s highly dynamic content environment, advertisers need both capabilities operating together in near real-time rather than relying on manual intervention.
Ultimately, the objective is to continuously improve media quality. Better media quality leads to stronger business outcomes by ensuring brands appear in suitable environments, reach real audiences and maximise campaign effectiveness. For CMOs, this directly supports key business objectives, while also providing CFOs with greater confidence in media accountability.
Q) How do you see agency trading teams changing their planning and optimisation processes as independent verification becomes available across more inventory?
Samir: Agency trading teams are increasingly embracing independent verification because advertiser expectations are shifting towards outcome-based buying rather than media buying alone.
As accountability becomes more important, agencies are focusing on eliminating media waste by ensuring campaigns are fraud-free, viewable, geographically accurate and delivered within brand-suitable environments.
Brand suitability has become particularly important. Beyond simply avoiding unsafe content, advertisers increasingly want their messaging to appear in environments that reinforce positive brand associations. An SUV campaign, for example, performs more effectively alongside travel or adventure content than next to inappropriate contextual environments.
Independent verification enables agencies to optimise across these multiple dimensions, creating higher-quality media investments that ultimately improve advertiser outcomes.
Q) Will independent verification become a mandatory expectation across all major B2B advertising platforms in the coming years?
Samir: Independent verification exists to eliminate bias. Just as governance requires independent oversight, digital advertising benefits from having an impartial measurement partner validating campaign performance.
While it is difficult to predict when verification will become mandatory across every platform, the industry is clearly moving in that direction. As digital advertising accounts for an increasingly larger share of marketing budgets, advertisers naturally demand greater transparency into where their investments are going and what results they are delivering.
Independent verification is no longer viewed as an optional enhancement. It is becoming a foundational requirement for building trust, improving accountability and enabling meaningful comparisons across platforms. Its importance will continue to grow over the coming years.
Q) How are Indian advertisers responding to DoubleVerify’s recently launched products and which industry sectors are the earliest adopters of DV’s latest media verification technologies?
Samir: The strong adoption of DoubleVerify’s newer products reflects evolving advertiser demand rather than technology being introduced ahead of the market. DV’s product roadmap is closely aligned with where advertisers are directing their media investments. As advertisers expand into newer environments, they expect independent verification to be available there as well.
Adoption varies across markets, agencies and advertisers, depending on their level of digital maturity. In India, products such as DV Scibids have witnessed particularly strong adoption among both agencies and advertisers, making India one of the company’s strongest global markets for optimisation solutions.
Historically, FMCG companies were among the earliest adopters of verification technologies in India. Today, adoption has expanded significantly across e-commerce, BFSI, automotive, quick commerce and several other sectors. Rather than being concentrated within a single industry, verification and optimisation are becoming mainstream capabilities across virtually every major advertising category.
Q) As CTV advertising catches up to digital, how should buyers address its unique fraud risks?
Samir: Connected TV has emerged as one of the fastest-growing digital advertising channels, driven by both audience adoption and advertiser interest. As television becomes increasingly measurable, advertisers naturally see significant opportunities in premium large-screen environments.
However, rapid growth has also attracted sophisticated fraud. DoubleVerify’s latest Global Insights Report found CTV fraud schemes increased by 140% in just one year, highlighting the need for stronger safeguards.
Advertisers should therefore prioritise transparency across the CTV supply chain. This includes understanding exactly where campaigns are running, verifying content-level placements, ensuring advertisements are fully viewable on active television screens, validating geographic delivery and protecting campaigns against fraud.
Achieving this requires close collaboration across publishers, agencies, technology providers and advertisers. Greater transparency throughout the ecosystem will be essential for ensuring that CTV continues to deliver trusted, high-quality media experiences.
Q) How does independent media verification help CMOs defend their media investments under tight budgets?
Samir: Marketing budgets today face unprecedented scrutiny, making accountability more important than ever. Independent verification enables CMOs to clearly demonstrate where every advertising dollar has been invested, how media quality has been maintained and what contribution those investments have made towards business outcomes.
Verification alone is not enough. The real value comes from combining verification, measurement, optimisation and attribution into a connected workflow that links campaign quality directly to business performance.
As AI-driven automation increasingly becomes part of media buying and optimisation, advertisers will be able to make these decisions more efficiently while maintaining appropriate human oversight. Ultimately, if media investments can be transparently tied to measurable business outcomes, budget discussions become significantly more productive because performance is supported by independent evidence rather than assumptions.
