Siddhanth Siriskar takes on expanded ad measurement and fraud role at Affle

BENGALURU: Siddhanth Siriskar has taken on an expanded role at Affle, leading ad measurement and integrity across the group’s Appnext, Newton, mDSP and Ultra Platform businesses. On paper it is a job title. In practice it is a bet that the next phase of mobile advertising will be won not by whoever spends the most on user acquisition, but by whoever can prove, convincingly, that the clicks and installs they are paying for are real.

That bet is not a small one. Mobile ad fraud has quietly become one of the industry’s costliest open secrets, with fake engagements, click spam and attribution hijacking siphoning ad budgets from marketers who often have no easy way to tell real users from bot traffic. Siriskar’s career has tracked this problem from the inside. At AppsFlyer, he cut fraud scores from over 50 per cent to under 5 per cent for OEMs, DSPs and ad exchanges he worked with, and helped detect and block 20bn fake engagements. That is not a rounding error. It is the sort of number that should make any chief marketing officer nervous about how much of their budget has, historically, gone straight into the pockets of bot farms.

His move to Affle matters because it consolidates measurement and fraud oversight across four distinct product lines under one remit, rather than leaving each business unit to fight its own fires. Appnext handles app discovery and monetisation, Newton is Affle’s newer AI play, mDSP runs programmatic demand, and Ultra Platform rounds out the stack. Fragmented fraud strategy across a group this size is an invitation for gaps. A single point of accountability for mobile measurement partner integrations, attribution and technical partnerships is, frankly, overdue.

The broader signal here is about where ad-tech is heading. As privacy regulation tightens and third-party cookies fade from relevance, measurement is shifting from a background function to a competitive differentiator. Advertisers are not just asking whether a platform can deliver installs anymore. They are asking whether it can prove those installs are human, attributable and worth paying for. Firms that treat fraud prevention as core infrastructure, not an afterthought bolted onto the reporting dashboard, are the ones likely to hold on to advertiser trust as budgets get squeezed and scrutiny rises.

Siriskar’s appointment is a small data point in a much larger shift: mobile advertising growing up, and measurement integrity becoming the price of entry rather than a nice-to-have. For an industry that has spent years apologising for its bot problem, that is a genuinely welcome direction of travel.