The long awaited report into the use of kickbacks and rebates in the US ad industry, commissioned by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), has been released. An Independent Study of Media Transparency in the US Advertising Industry was carried out with K2 Intelligence.

“The pervasiveness of these practices in the sample strongly suggests that non-transparent business practices are also common in the media buying ecosystem,” the ANA said.

The ANA was driven to investigate due to “widespread concern about certain business practices plus a lack of consensus on whether these practices were actually occurring, it said in the report. This was the “root cause of a progressive and counter-productive erosion of trust among industry constituents”.

Read the full The Media Online article here.