I had always wanted to write about Online Advertising in India and the next couple of posts are related to the same. WebChutney which claims itself to be India’s No 1 Digital agency had some poorly implemented Ad network system. Their network was infected by Malware and Google flagged the same which the company Engineers [if any] were probably unaware of. What really happens is hackers take control of Ad Serving Server and insert a script to be served to all users. The Script will serve malicious content from a different server. Unfortunately, Advertising Networks across the world except Google don’t have the capability to analyze such a hack. Google to promote a user friendly web free from Malware gave out its SafeBrowsing API which anybody can use and implement and take care of issues like that of WebChutney. FireFox and Chrome browsers have implemented SafeBrowsing API internally and hence all users going online with those browsers were safe and the rest could have been infected.
WebChutney’s list of clients include Airtel, Kingfisher, Titan, ITC, etc and I wonder how they were able to sign-up these corporates 😉 I wonder what wast the loss to these clients and others using WebChutney’s network [iGovernment]
Is Online Advertising about Marketing or Technology ? There are over a dozen Ad Networks in India and I am inclined to say none of them have implemented Google’s SafeBrowsing API or a similar system. Internet Advertising once upon a time used to be a total marketing effort with the big guys [newspapers, portals as publishers and Coke, Ford, etc as advertisers] getting all the attention. However, Disruptive Technology like AdWords changed the entire industry and the Big Guys are on the receiving end today 🙂
Indian advertisers should realize the importance of technology along with marketing and put a hard effort to innovate otherwise they are digging their own grave 🙂