There is a growing concern, that the changes in Indian digital advertising might worsen the ecosystem instead of improving it. While some industry leaders believe we are entering an Outcome Era, where the key focus is achieving real and measurable results, I believe we are already in that phase. Now is the right time to welcome the Quality Era.
The Quality Era of advertising aims to create valuable experiences for customers, prioritizing quality over quantity. This involves analysing the quality of the audience, media, and creative. In a previous article, I shared my views on adopting standard attention metrics (It’s time to standardize attention metrics in digital advertising) that are globally accepted to ensure quality for every single ad spend.
The reason I am advocating for this, is the recent Pitch Madison Advertising Report 2024 that states – India’s advertising AdEx contribution is only 1.2% of the global advertising AdEx. The US leads with 31.2%, followed by China (16.8%), the UK (4.4%), Japan (3.4%), and Germany (2.8%). The report also indicates that digital media held a 40% share of the total Indian advertising AdEx. This clearly represents the importance of digital media over the other five mediums.
But here’s the question: While India has the world’s largest population and is poised to become the third-largest consumer market, why does it contribute only 1.2% to the global AdEx? This highlights that the Indian advertising industry is prioritizing quantity with low rates and ignoring quality. While digital media is the fastest-growing advertising medium globally because of transparency and real-time reporting, we must focus on enhancing the quality of the media rather than focusing only on results. Because of this, the audience funnel narrows and advertisers face challenges in ad recall and brand uplift.
Digital platforms often strive to prove that everything works—sometimes taking credit for results they didn’t generate, using tactics that make things look better than they are. This approach thrived when rich user data was readily available online. But with evolving data privacy regulations, that pool of information has shrunk. The industry also loves its buzzwords—“outcomes” being a favourite. While it sounds impactful, its overuse in varying contexts has diluted its meaning. I’ve seen both sales and simple ad views labelled as outcomes. If we can’t agree on what an “outcome” truly means, how can we ensure we’re measuring the right metrics and making smart decisions? We need clearer goals. There’s a saying, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Nearly all metrics we now call outcomes have lost their value the moment they became targets.
We often define quality as something that helps achieve results—but not every single ad needs to lead directly to a sale. Instead, we can look at patterns across many ads, users, and results to find clues. Unfortunately, low-quality tactics—like made-for-advertising sites, misleading video ads, and even invisible ads—often get credited for sales, leading to significant wastage of money. Because we don’t really agree on what “results” are, low-quality ads can easily trick the system. That’s why we should focus on ensuring the ads themselves are good, not just on the results.
As online tracking gets harder in cookie-less world, it will be tough to prove exactly which ads led to sales. So, companies will return to using older methods like testing different strategies to see what really works. But these tests will only be done on a small part of their budget. Most of the time, they will rely on signals that show the quality of the ads, which are the best indicators of whether they will lead to good results.
So, what is a better goal for our advertising industry? Should we focus on just results, or on ensuring the ads themselves are good? And if we want to focus on both, how do we ensure we don’t repeat the same mistakes we are making now, manipulating the system to claim credit for results they did not generate?
(Views are personal)
