Agencies need to clean up their acts: Indiscriminate use of programmatic trading is crushing trust in advertising
Reports showing that advertisers have been unwittingly funding illegal terror groups through an indiscriminate distribution of their online ads confirms something that many already suspected.
The relationship between advertisers, agents and online publishers is in urgent need of a re-boot, where transparency and full disclosure make the kind of worrying aberrations reported in The Times a thing of the past.
How we got to this stage is a question worth asking. Following the economic crash, various food scandals, the Leveson Inquiry and the MPs’ expenses debacle of the last decade, trust became an issue that was very much front of mind. Acts would be cleaned up, we were told – transparency was the order of the day. How quickly we forget.
It might be a cliché but the line "Trust takes years to build, seconds to break and forever to repair" is something we should all be pondering right now.
It’s not entirely the fault of brands that they have ended up in this position – the disconnect between them and the people that they pay to do their bidding has grown in recent years. The slavish devotion to all things new and "digital" that promised a competitive advantage (with scant research to back it up), egged on by agencies that could see a useful additional revenue stream, clouded collective judgment.
On paper, at least, programmatic advertising that claimed to offer more precise ways to target consumers seemed intoxicating and seductive. But to see brands throw so much revenue and thereby equity at something that was at best unproven, and now appears potentially very damaging, contradicts all good marketing theory. It also jeopardises those countless years and thousands, sometimes millions, of pounds that advertisers have spent building their reputation.
The sheer complexity of the online bidding process has made the system opaque – it’s little wonder that advertisers have been inclined to follow the strategic advice of their agencies rather than risk spending time (and money) fully investigating the efficacy of what they have been buying. And in fairness to agencies, they too have seen programmatic as an opportunity that they cannot afford to miss for fear of also being left behind. The good thing is that both parties are now starting to ask questions, having been bedazzled by Silicon Valley giants promising the world.
Most of the industry must be thinking that the relationship between advertisers and agencies needs some fundamental reappraisal. It’s why Procter & Gamble’s Marc Pritchard last month declared that greater transparency is needed from media owners and media agencies to ensure that advertisers really are getting value for money and that the “crappy media supply chain” is clarified. Pritchard also tacitly acknowledged that P&G had been complicit in allowing such murky practices by succumbing to the “latest shiny objects” that offered no real verification or metrics.
For other advertisers, including those that have unwittingly been caught up in the scandal of the elicit funding of terror groups and others to which no brand would ever want to be affiliated, it’s surely time for them to be more robust with their agencies in order to protect their most precious asset – their reputation.