In a world cluttered with content, misinformation, and security threats, it becomes critical for a safer ecosystem that prioritises trust, clarity, and responsible innovation. 

On the final day of Goafest 2025, the session, ‘Building a safer, smarter, cleaner media ecosystem’, touched upon these challenges. Moderated by Shibhani Gharat, anchor and senior producer, CNBC TV18, the chat featured Tejas Apte, head - media, digital marketing, Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL).  

Setting the context of the discussion, Apte highlighted how the industry needs to look at measures that make advertising more effective for all.

“The starting point was digital becoming almost half of our AdEx, and then waking up to the reality that large organised advertisers who have the benefit of referring to global markets or peers are the ones who benefit out of it more. Some of the local regional advertisers may not have that benefit,” he said. 

Building further on his viewpoint, he shared, “Digital is very large but not everybody is well versed with the shortcomings of it as a medium and hence there are things that we can do to plug the gap. First, it has to be safe both for consumers and brands. And that means the ad has to appear next to content which is deemed safe. Secondly, it has to be viewable, which means it can't be a fake impression or a scroll below which consumers are not even going. Brand safety and viewability are big for us. Lastly, the ethical use of first-party data. If advertisers don't have the confidence that the databases that they are tapping into have actually been collected with the consent of consumers and hence are safe to use, it will create a problem in the long run.”

As Apte talked about the practices one can follow to make ads safer, he advised the brands on what kind of metrics to look at to understand the brand impact. 

“We need to make people aware that there are input metrics, which platforms can share and then there's a set of metrics which advertisers and marketers should look at, which are basically business metrics" he mentioned. 

On the recent CCI raids, Apte noted, “Nobody knows what has triggered and what's being investigated. I don’t think there is anything in the public domain which tells where the investigation is going.”

While the industry is going through a trend where companies are moving their creative work in-house, Apte believes that no brand can go completely in-house.

He noted, “I can’t think of a client where everything is in-house. There are different degrees of in-house work which different clients have done, including ourselves. The upsides clearly are that one can share business data more freely. Business decisions become easier and data flow is better. The creative idea will still come from the creative person in the agency."