At an event last week, AK Lahoti, former chairman of TRAI, advocated a measurement system comprising multiple rating agencies, which he said, would enhance transparency and the overall reliability of audience data. He was speaking in the context of TV ratings but it opened up a can of worms.
In 2024, digital advertising saw an impressive 17% growth and hit 70,000 crore, overtaking television to become the largest contributor to India’s 2.5-trillion media and entertainment sector, as per the FICCI-EY 2025 report. But while digital dominates revenue charts, its measurement and real impact remains a matter of scrutiny. “We’re using legacy yardsticks to measure a moving target, and that creates a massive trust gap,” says Ambika Sharma, founder and chief strategist at Pulp Strategy. “Our infrastructure is still calibrated to a TV-first world, where media was centrally bought and measured. Digital doesn’t fit those old pipes.”
Television continues to rely on BARC, which, while not perfect, is an audited, centralised measurement currency widely accepted by advertisers. Digital, by contrast, is a fragmented landscape. Major platforms such as Meta, Google, and OTT apps function as “walled gardens,” each reporting performance via their own dashboards, with their own definitions of engagement and reach. “India’s current media measurement infrastructure is not adequately equipped for digital-first advertising,” says Yasin Hamidani, director at Media Care Brand Solutions. “The lack of standardisation across platforms undermines trust, complicates media planning, and makes it extremely difficult to compare performance accurately.”That opacity is compounded by the scale of digital ad fraud.
“From bot-driven views to inflated impressions, the ecosystem is littered with manipulated data masked as performance,” points out Ayush Nambiar, managing director of Flags communications. Industry estimates suggest fraud in India’s digital ecosystem ranges between $400–600 million annually. Click fraud, where bots mimic real users, remains rampant. So does view inflation, where videos auto-play silently or serve impressions without actual audience attention. Fake traffic from click farms and spoofed domains also plague programmatic ad buys.
“Skepticism is not just common — it’s a survival skill,” says Suyash Lahoti, partner at Wit & Chai Group. “We’re not measuring effectiveness — we’re tallying visibility and pretending it means impact.”
Third-party verification tools like MOAT, DoubleVerify, and IAS offer some degree of protection, but adoption varies across sectors and budgets. “Every platform is both player and referee,” Sharma notes. “Until we de-risk the metric layer with neutral oversight, trust will remain patchy.”Moreover, fragmented digital measurement jeopardises accurate ROI calculation on account of inconsistent metrics of different platforms, says Shradha Agarwal, co-founder and global CEO of Grapes Worldwide.
Thus, the idea of a BARC-like unified digital measurement system is gaining momentum, but execution remains the hurdle. “There is a clear need, and a fast-growing hunger, for such a system,” said Delphin Varghese, co-founder and chief revenue officer at AdCounty Media. “But entrenched platforms have little incentive to open up. It would require an industry-led consortium with buy-in from agencies, brands, and platforms alike.”
Kartik Mehta, head of Asia, Channel Factory, echoes this sentiment: “A consortium-driven model, similar to global alliances like GARM (Global Alliance for Responsible Media, which once functioned globally to create common standards for brand safety and suitability), could work well, but it needs strong backing to succeed. Without industry-wide alignment, standardisation will remain aspirational.”
Marketers, meanwhile, are left to balance scale with specificity. “Performance-led brands chase platform-specific outcomes like cost per click and return on ad spend,” says Sharma. “But enterprise marketers still need apples-to-apples comparability when defending budgets across TV, digital, and OOH.”
The disconnect forces planners to toggle between click-through rates, gross rating points, and video completion rates with little contextual harmony. “We’ve built highways for ad delivery,” says Lahoti, “but not the rear-view mirrors to assess if we’re even on the right road.”
Until India builds a unified system that brings digital measurement out of its silos, the sector’s runaway growth will remain at odds with its accountability, experts say.