Last week, the Doomsday Clock was moved from 3 minutes to midnight to 2.5 minutes to 12. Scientists believe that the chance of the world going up in a thermonuclear puff of smoke is the highest it’s been since 1953. This in the same week that Marc Pritchard, the global brand building officer from P&G, made waves by announcing that P&G, in effect, had moved the hand of the ad-spend doomsday clock to 12. High noon!

Read More MediaPost: P&G Wants To Drain The Digital Advertising Swamp. Who’s Going To Step Up?

Read More The Australian Business Review: Procter & Gamble’s Marc Pritchard Shines Light on Digital Murkiness

It was a bold admission of failure by the chief brand officer of the world’s largest advertiser: “I confess that P&G believed the myth that we could be a ‘first mover’ on all of the latest shiny objects, despite the lack of standards and measurements and verification.”

Read More MarketingDive: P&G’s Pritchard Challenges Ad Vendors: Clean Up Media Supply Chain or We’ll Invest Elsewhere

After a long period of talk and nice conference discussions, is the start of 2017 finally turning out to be the start of really doing something about transparency? With today’s massive P&G announcement, it would certainly appear so. We’ve had a lot of talk and it’s probably fair to say that media agencies have had to be, shall we say, “inventive” with how they keep margins up — but could we now be seeing a year of clamp-downs?

Read More MediaPost LondonBlog: Did P&G Just Call Out The Ad Industry? Transparency Or We Hit The Highway?

P&G isn’t going to give digital a free pass anymore.

Its agencies, ad tech partners and publishers must enable viewability and third-party measurement and root out fraud. Contracts must be transparent.

Read More AdExchanger: P&G’s Pritchard: ‘We Don’t Want To Waste Time And Money On A Crappy Media Supply Chain’

Australia’s top brands have joined the world’s biggest advertiser Procter & Gamble in calling for tough action against questionable practices in digital advertising to protect them from a growing crisis about the way ad dollars are spent in the online world.

Read More The Australian Business Review: Brands join P&G demanding action against online ad shonks

Procter & Gamble Co., which claims to be the world’s largest advertiser, is reviewing every one of its agency contracts as part of a crackdown on rip-offs related to digital marketing.

Read More Cincinnati Business Courier: P&G cracking down on media shenanigans, ad chief says

A study from the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) — a trade body that represents brands such as P&G, L’Oréal, and Emirates — found that nearly 90% of the advertisers it polled are reviewing their programmatic advertising contracts and demanding more control and transparency.

Read More Business Insider: ‘90%’ of advertisers are reviewing their programmatic ad contracts as they look for more transparency

Marketers across the globe are adapting their relationships with agency trading desks to gain greater transparency into programmatic buys, according to the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA).

Read More AdExchanger: WFA Sees Marketers Rethinking Programmatic Strategies With Transparency Top Of Mind