As the Shanghai stock market rollercoaster continues its wayward course, we need no more timely reminder of the fickle nature of consumer confidence. Whether it's company valuations or the online advertising market, the penalty that we pay for overconfidence can be brutal.
Recent revelations from Adobe and Google on the effectiveness of programmatic online advertising campaigns have made considerable headway in fleshing out anxieties already raised in a high profile sting in May 2014.
It was only a year ago that an incriminating study by Telemetry for a BMW campaign through Rocket Fuel revealed that 57 percent of impressions attributed to consumers in a recent campaign had in fact been delivered to nefarious botnets - machine to machine exposure that was going to do little to sell luxury cars.
So it's no great surprise that mainstream brands like Adobe and Google have crossed the 't's and dotted the 'i's before joining a chorus of more arcane and less publicly recognisable industry insiders like ComScore in raising concerns about the robustness of the technical solutions being offered in the wild frontiers of the programmatic trading industry.
It shouldn't really matter as much as it does - it's not as if television or the press offer audience guarantees that are any more accountable. We still don't know how people's attention wanders during the ad breaks or how many people read beyond page 7.
But it does matter more for digital, because of the promises the industry makes.
As a newcomer to digital back at Yahoo! when I joined in 2002 with digital advertising revenue share stuttering at 1.25%, I asked the sales team one by one to describe the single overriding reason why an advertiser should invest in digital advertising. The answer was almost unanimous: "because it's accountable'.
I despaired.
I couldn't image a single chief executive who hauled themselves out of bed in the morning with the single minded goal to increase accountability: they'd want to sell more cars, or beer, or insurance.
Accountability, I argued, was a hygiene factor, not a justification for investment. We needed to sell digital advertising because it worked, not because it came with a neat spreadsheet attached.
Nevertheless, buoyed by the data, the digital ad industry boomed. Entire industry sectors flourished, careers were made, Ferraris bought and empires were formed on the power of statistics.
I was converted, I was a fan. It was a Damascene moment.
Yet as famine turned to feast, amongst the market makers and social revolutionaries the predators circled unobserved.
Backroom bandits and ebullient traders contributed in equal measure to an increasingly unstable environment in which plenty of players were looking to make a fast buck by trading statistics instead of effectiveness - and they all underestimated the threat of technological progress.
It should have come as no surprise when it came time to call bullshit on the bots.
I am not recanting. This is no cause for a drop in confidence. Digital media is as effective now as it has ever been - claiming over forty percent of consumer attention it entirely justifies the share of media investment that it takes.
It should be judged on its outcomes. It would take a charlatan or a competitive advertising executive to claim otherwise.
Concepts such as banner blindness remain red herrings predicated on the claim that the only effective brand encounter is one that involves a click. Try justifying that to political parties or other outstanding out-of-home advertisers of our time.
Digital marketing is certainly not irreversibly damaged. Perhaps it is tarnished by the actions of a few unsavoury cousins, but we should see the revelations of the last few weeks as a clearing of the account.
Perhaps also, though, it is time to tidy up the books and prioritise our investment according to metrics that genuinely reflect our achievements in the consumer environment. We need to emphasise those metrics which illustrate the consumer journey through awareness, interest, desire, action, loyalty and advocacy.
These are measurable through saliency and consumer sentiment, through engagement and time spent with brand, through transactions and sharing.
These are the metrics where content marketing flourishes. It is no coincidence that this is the watchword of our times.
When we look for our next opportunity, we should be heartily reminded that get rich quick schemes are rarely that. Wiser heads than ours would remind us that healthy relationships are a two way street, and that to derive best value from our customers, we need to invest heavily in the experiences and value we offer them.
Nick Fawbert, managing director Asia for Brand New Media