A lot of marketers talk about achieving transparent media trading, but often those demands are aimed solely at the agency. In the latest installment of our Confessions series, where we exchange anonymity for honesty, a former ad buying executive at one of the big five holding groups says that too few marketers think about how they take control of their media beyond the relationships with their agencies.

Why should marketers be thinking about transparency across their supply chain?
Marketers moan about agencies in the transparency debate, but they need to spend more time looking at what all the other players in their supply chain are doing. There have been concerns in the past over how much of money going in that chain actually ends up with the publisher, and yet there aren’t many who know how to get beyond working out what the agency may or may not have been skimming off the top of whatever got spent. When I was working at the agency, we were trying to convince one of our clients to run a test where we’d use a Google demand-side platform to buy from the Google supply-side platform to see how much the publisher got.

Read the full Digiday article here.