Transparency hit fever pitch last year, gaining prominence across the world with ANA’s report on media rebates, as well as Facebook and Google misreporting metrics. Despite the rise and subsequent drop in talkabilty, it shows no sign of leaving adland’s just lexicon yet.
Just when we thought the ubiquitous ‘transparency’ word had taken a short break, having slid off a few LinkedIn posts, it seems its close relative ‘radical transparency’ has taken its place. Be it black or white, or more fittingly grey, talk of the subject and its various guises continues to evolve, but by prefacing the word with ‘radical’ — as many now do at conferences and across varying online platforms — will we take it more seriously? What does ‘radical transparency’ mean to people and should we be taking this topic more radically serious?
At our AdNews Live Tackling Transparency event last year, we got 100 people in the audience to vote on three solutions to tackle adland’s transparency problems. Keep an eye on AdNews June edition for our follow-up on how far we’ve actually come as an industry on this. In the meantime, we put this new talk of ‘radical’ transparency to three ad tech execs to get their view.
Mitch Waters • Trade desk general manager ANZ
Radical transparency is generally accepted to mean removing all barriers to free and easy public access to information.
What does radical transparency look like within the digital advertising ecosystem? For a start, all parties within the supply chain would have access to transparent information around fee structures and services. There’s nothing particularly radical about that (well, there shouldn’t be).
I think a lot of marketers have taken a simplistic view that by moving their buying in–house or using only one tech stack, they are cutting out the middle men and solving their transparency problems.
Ironically enough, being radically transparent sometimes requires more people in the supply chain — like third–party viewability and ad fraud vendors. Having a third party as part of the supply chain ensures marketers aren’t judging campaigns solely by their tech providers’ own metrics — the ad–tech equivalent of marking your own homework.
If we as an industry are going down the path of radical transparency, we need to take a long hard look at objectivity. Objectivity means the ability of your tech provider to objectively assess all media and assign your spend appropriately and without bias.
The industry’s transparency issue is exacerbated because so many ad– tech companies look more like media companies. Many have business models where they represent both the buyer and the seller at the same time. This creates an internal conflict that leads to a lack of transparency. It also means these players could bias their own media. Not very radical, right?
Mitch Waters
June Cheung • Grapeshot ANZ VP
The transparency conversation isn’t a new one, yet it continues to evolve. The past 18 months have seen a steady influx of transparency challenges that have left major brands with big questions.
At its core, transparency addresses the loss of trust between a brand and a consumer. With significant revenue impact hinged on reputational damage, trust becomes an emotion with a dollar sign.
The industry is calling for radical transparency because the confidence of the brand in their chosen partners is critical for success, given the nature of programmatic advertising.
Radical transparency affects the entire ad tech ecosystem and each of us is responsible for creating a more transparent environment through the way we do business, including agency fees, billing models, data origins, cookie tracking, etc.
A true commitment is expected from everyone — brands, agency partners, publishers and tech vendors — to think about transparency from consumers’ perspective, how their data is collected and used. It’s a good thing to see laws such as The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Privacy Act coming into play, which puts the power back into consumers’ hands and measures taken if their data is compromised.
At Grapeshot, we see advertisers are getting more and more savvy in asking the right questions. With our Contextual Intelligence Platform, we are able to demonstrate our methodology, how we do things, with no black box or cookie tracking. This provides a lot of comfort to our clients and keeps us compliant. We believe in this new age of media, regardless of where you are in the supply chain, anyone who can’t adapt will be left behind.
June Cheung
Peter Barry • Pubmatic country manager ANZ
Ask anyone in our industry what the current hot topics are and you can be sure that one consistent answer will be “transparency”. Transparency can mean many things — what sites an ad appears on, what advertisers appear on your site, fee disclosure between tech partners and advertisers/ publishers, and so on.
The ad tech industry has taken great leaps forward recently. Ads. txt (and in the future, ads.cert) empowers advertisers with the knowledge that they are buying inventory from legitimate sources. PubMatic offers a fraud–free guarantee to buyers to further re– assure them that their dollars are ending up where they should.
The removal of buy side fees has cleared up the supply chain, which is great news for both buyers and publishers. These developments have come about in the last 12 months, and, while there is more to do, much of the opaqueness previously associated with programmatic has now been dealt with.
Some companies have put forward the concept of ‘radical transparency’ to promote mass disclosure of customer fee rates. While this may sound good, the reality is that business arrangements are too complex, and companies’ product capabilities are too varied to make it practical. Mass fee disclosure could unfortunately result in a single, isolated commercial term becoming the dominant driver of technology decisions.
A viable path forward requires a mentality shift for decision–makers. The way to achieve trust is to move the industry towards a mature software procurement approach that is transparent, lowers costs for everyone, and creates healthy relationships. At PubMatic, we have recently introduced new pricing models that are no longer based on rev–shares, but on subscription models. This leads to a fixed cost base for publishers and allows for more complex transaction methods like PMP and header bidding.
Trust between publishers, advertisers and vendors is achievable, but not through headline grabbing and impractical suggestions like radical transparency. To accomplish this, clear, mature pricing models are needed.
Peter Barry
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