And in an industry where ‘accountability’ is a near-constant catchcry from any given conference stage, that means audits, as marketers demand assurances that a media dollar spent is a dollar invested.

In recent months the ANA signaled its intention for its members not to have the wool pulled over their eyes, and now the U.S. trade body representing media agencies wants to do likewise — but as recent headlines attest, this is easier said than done.

‘Agencies’ rocky path’

The 4A’s will today publish a whitepaper for members — dubbed ‘The Rocky Path Agencies Are Forced To Traverse’ — with advice on how to reduce the complexity of programmatic trading, a process commonly referred to as “supply path optimization.”

The paper addresses the usual laundry list of complaints about “black box programmatic technologies” including everything from click-fraud, frequency-capping, plus the quality/misrepresentation of inventory.

Kevin Freemore, svp, media, technology and data at the 4A’s told Digiday that while there is much of the programmatic ecosystem that agencies don’t have full transparency on, such as dynamic take rates or the intricacies of content verification, the report aims to address some ‘misnomers’. For instance, the vast majority of holding companies do not trade programmatically on poorly curated open ad exchanges, according to Freemore, who said that this is in contrast to popular belief.

“SPO has been used interchangeably with ‘transparency’ but they’re two very different things,” he added. “It can be optimizing campaigns to performance publishers with higher conversions [as opposed to branding KPIs], or shifting budgets away from areas with higher levels of fraud or creating private marketplaces.”

Marla Kaplowitz, president and CEO of the 4A’s, recommended that media agencies work with companies and their partners to vet their processes for finding bad actors and then excluding them from their supply chain.

“If you look at the paper it’s pretty in-depth and we’re providing it as a guide to be sure that agencies and marketers can go through all of these to mitigate as many potential issues as possible, yet we also know that it is not 100 percent foolproof,” she added.

“There’s a lot to understand and agencies are in an interesting situation as they’re aggregating, pushing and trying to understand the best that they can, but these are real issues, and you then you see some marketers say, ‘We’re just going to bring this in-house’ but that doesn’t solve any issues.”

Financial transaprency

Additionally, the latest 4A’s paper pays particular attention to fee transparency among the myriad tiers of the ad tech supply chain, an aspect of SPO where the trade body maintains that media agencies often unfairly receive blame — similar to the 2016 ANA report. …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron