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It’s been a turbulent time for the marketing and media industry recently: the very notion of transparency, long a bastion of the client-agency process, has come under fire on several fronts.
Read More Forbes.com: How CMOs Can Get Transparent With Their Agencies About Rebates
The advertising agency industry was rocked in late 2015 by allegations of improper actions being taken with advertiser dollars, especially — but not limited to — the media investments being handled by large multinational agencies/holding companies.
Facebook‘s (FB) video advertising debacle, in which it overestimated the average viewing time for its video ads, will not lead to a massive refund to advertisers since it delivered on what it was contractually obligated to do.
Read More The Street: Update: Video Ad Snafu May Return to Haunt Facebook
Facebook has pivoted its ad server Atlas (which it bought for hundreds of millions from Microsoft in 2013) to be used as a measurement tool, a development which emerged amid much controversy for the social network. In the first of a two-part series, The Drum probed some of the industry’s largest media spenders to gauge their reaction.
Read More The Drum: Media agencies’ reaction to Facebook’s latest transparency overtures
It is a “surprise” the practice of agency rebates isn’t a bigger issue, according to David Wheldon, CMO of the RBS Group.
The recent focus on transparency in how agencies handle clients’ media budgets has led to further scrutiny of the opaque practices of so-called barter agencies, set up by holding companies to exchange extra goods for media space. The two Association of National Advertisers’ agency transparency reports mention the practice nearly 50 times.
Read More Digiday: With focus on transparency, barter agencies get more scrutiny
ONE OF THE great promises of online videos was the potential to measure precisely how effective they were: Audiences reported not through inexact ratings and surveys but directly, down to the person and the millisecond he or she spent watching.
Read More The New York Times: The Online Video View: We Can Count It, but Can We Count on It?
Some pretty big promises were made about digital advertising. There’d be more data and more transparency, they said. The performance of online ads can be tracked and optimised in real time, they said. Return on investment would be clear, they said. The internet doesn’t make mistakes, they said.
Read More Independent.ie: Online advertising: lots of promises, but not so much delivery
ADVERTISING WEEK, an annual stretch of industry meetings that began on September 26th in New York, is usually defined by schmoozing and self-congratulation. This year’s event has been marred by suspicion. In the week leading up to it, Dentsu Aegis, a big agency, admitted overbilling by its digital-ad division in Japan; and Facebook, a tech giant, said it had inflated the average time people spent watching video ads.
The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) used Advertising Week New York as a platform to voice brands’ dissatisfaction over this month’s furore over Facebook’s admission that it had over-reported video measurements.