Sir Martin Sorrell’s WPP had recently blacklisted more than 2,000 US websites that carry illegal or pirated content to ensure client ad campaigns only appear in legitimate digital media space. The US division of GroupM, WPP’s media planning and buying operation, spends about $3.5bn (£2.1bn) annually on buying ad space on websites. Over time, as many pirate sites are known to “domain hop”, the rule will eventually be expanded to encompass GroupM’s global operations.

Following this, AlooTechie spoke to some of India’s leading digital ad networks to understand how this policy, if implemented in India, would affect the Indian digital media business and how would the monitoring of ads happen?

Anurag Gupta, managing director, DGM India was of the view that there are various web publishers giving various kind of content and right from Google down to other networks, no one wants to work with publishers who engage in content piracy. So it is a step in the right direction for protecting and valuing content IPR.

“It is very difficult to decide which websites flout these rules. For instance most of the original producers of content are giving their content out as RSS feeds for extra distribution by other web publishers. As long as other web publishers are giving acknowledgement of the original content source and give link backs the content creators seem to be happy, do we label all of such websites as content pirates? How does one decide which websites are indulging in piracy? Does the classification get backed by complaints from original content producer? What about websites like Samachar.com? What about Google itself that shows some part of content in their search result page? Do they have explicit permission from content creators to show their content? So, this is a fairly complex issue and I am not sure if WPP alone can or should decide,” Anurag Gupta added.

Rammohan Sundaram, founder, CEO and managing director, NetworkPlay Media said that piracy is a threat to every industry, whether software, movies, music or games. One has to consciously take an effort as a consumer to not indulge in any activity that is remotely illegal and piracy is illegal. “We saw what happened to Guruji in India after T Series sued them for usage of content though it had a complex web of downloading mechanism. India is following steps in that direction and it is just a matter of time when a policy decision happens at the govt level when these will really get actionable. If you ask my personal opinion I will do exactly the same to publishers. I don’t quite think advertiser has anything to do with this,” added Sundaram.

Nitin Chowdhary, business head and vice president, Tyroo Media said that this is a tricky situation and if the industry sets a norm, Tyroo would absolutely follow and respect that. “At the same time, we will also have to respect the focus on the consumer needs. There are always alternatives and consumers in India don’t really want to visit sited like these unless pricing and availability is the issue. All in all, the ecosystem will be positively impacted in case such norms come in place,” Nitin Chowdhary added.

Anurag Gupta of DGM was of the opinion that as an agency WPP is well within its rights to decide which publishers they want to work with. “Moreover, I am not sure if a WPP client wants to advertise on such specific sites how will WPP handle it? As of now, DGM as a network does not have any such policy and moreover in our 4 years of existence we have not received even 1 complaint from an original content creator that his content is being pirated by a publisher on DGM network. So we do not have a reason of taking any action as of now. If WPP rolls this out in the Indian market, I do not think it will impact the digital business overall. Content aggregators will see a reduction in their business for sure and some of these monies may go to the original content creators.”

According to Rammohan Sundaram of NetworkPlay, illegal sites run CPC and CPL campaigns and make money from something they do not own, this should surely get them arrested to begin with. “The impact on the digital business is that the same user who visits these sites will start visiting legitimate sites with similar content and can be reached out to there, so how does it anyway impact? I see no impact but a marginal cost increase in the CPC and CPL buys and this the client has to pay keeping in mind that the legitimate site running this content has costs incurring on procuring that content and so if someone gets a CPC at Re 1 on an illegal site he then has to pay Rs 3 for the legal site, that is all there is,” added Sundaram.

Speaking on how would the monitoring happen in case of the ad is routed through Right Media Exchange (RMX), Rammohan Sundaram said, “Right Media is an exchange and soon there will be Google’s Double Click Exchange and there are more in the business, it is upon the exchange monitoring professionals at the ad-ops and alliance level that this needs to be curbed. Whenever a publisher with remotely having a doubt on illegal content should go through multiple levels of scrutiny in the ad-ops team at these exchanges and they should decline offering them a seat in the first place, once that is done this can get easily curbed. The onus lies with the exchanges here.”

According to Nitin Chowdhary of Tyroo, RMX or any exchange functions in a manner where the control is on the hands of the agency or the network and as a result, the onus lies on the agencies to choose where all they should run their ads. “Advertising has to be done around the content and the control and selection of content has to be bullet proof going forward,” added Chowdhary.