ISBA’s latest programmatic transparency report points to a reduction in the ‘unknown’ ad spend delta, but more work is required

By Ronan Shields

Research from The Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) and PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) suggests the murkiness around programmatic media trading is gradually improving. However, independent researchers highlight the long road ahead before full transparency can be declared.

In early 2020, the duo produced a landmark report suggesting that less than half (49%) of all ad dollars spent using such technologies end up in publishers’ pockets, and also noted a 15% “unknown delta” within the supply chain.

This telling phrase, whereby auditors couldn’t account for 15% of advertisers’ spend, sparked concerns among CMOs with media execs on either side of the Atlantic known to have subsequently ordered transparency crackdowns in its wake.

The ISBA Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency Study was conducted along with the IAB U.K. and the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) with auditors informing Digiday that the adoption of its Programmatic Financial Audit Toolkit has streamlined reporting.

For example, the latest study took nine months to produce, as opposed to more than 18 months for the earlier iteration, with the implementation of more standardized reporting meaning auditors were better able to compare ad impressions between buy- and sell-side platforms.

Key findings included:

Match rates were 58% compared to 12% in 2020
Unattributable ad spend, A.K.A. “the unknown delta” has reduced to 3% on average

The proportion of advertiser spend reaching publishers has risen by 8%

More specifically, the latest study has uncovered notable differences in the delta between
open marketplaces (3%) and private marketplaces (~1%), reflecting the benefit of
investments by advertisers, their agencies, tech vendors and publishers in well-curated
auditable private marketplaces.

PwC’s Sam Tomlinson told Digiday that auditors aimed to eventually reduce the time to produce such a report to five months, and that tech vendors were able to provide approximately 80% of the data fields requested of them by auditors.

“A lot of the tech vendors couldn’t share log-level data [in 2020] they could only give us aggregate groups of impressions, this time round all the tech vendors were giving us log-level data and that’s a mass that’s critical for impression matching,” he added.

These audits aren’t one-offs, this sort of thing is not going away

Steve Chester, ISBA

“While 80% is not perfect, it’s pretty good… All of our impressions have broadly similar data quality. But you’re never going to be able to match all of them with the way that tech operates today.”

Tomlinson further explained how auditors can run into difficulty in matching specific impressions due to complications arising from lags between DSP and SSP data, especially when there isn’t a unique transaction ID to trace an ad impression across different platforms.

“When you get really high volumes of impressions going along a single supply path in a short space of time, you end up with multiple impressions that have an identical timestamp… It’s a rare instance of more data being unhelpful for analysis,” he said.

Steve Chester, director of media, ISBA, told Digiday that further work …read more

Source:: Digiday