Attributed to Adele Wieser, Regional Managing Director, APAC at Index Exchange
The birth of programmatic has opened up new possibilities in the field of online advertising with promised efficiency – but where there are opportunities, there are also challenges. It’s no surprise that the ecosystem is complex, and the inner workings of our ad tech supply chain have become unclear to both the publishers and buyers in our industry.
The supply chain is deemed complex due to the number of players in the ecosystem, which leads to the misunderstanding of how the supply chain works and how each player fits within the overall process of digital advertising. It’s because of this misunderstanding, and mistrust in the ad tech supply chain, that the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) launched an inquiry into digital platforms within the advertising industry in late 2017.
The topic of trust and transparency has dominated the headlines for many years and ultimately as tech players that sit in the centre of the supply chain, It’s on us to support the digital advertising industry to regain that trust.
In order to build a more accountable future, we need to take a step back and analyse what needs to change in order to facilitate a more trusted ecosystem.
Demanding more than just a verbal commitment to transparency
The biggest factor impacting the industry is fragmentation and how that led to a lack of standardisation. This was the result of every player in the ecosystem finding their own conventions, their own standards, their own scales for everything.
So, the biggest challenge becomes how to cut through all of the noise. Industry bodies have made great strides to rebuild the trust between players in the ecosystem – trust that was tarnished by bad practices and murky pricing models – with initiatives like the IAB’s transparency standards (sellers.json, supplychainObject, ads.txt, app.ads.txt and more recently, buyers.json and demandchainObject).
Whilst adoption for the sell-side standards is high in Australia, the reality is that the work isn’t done; programmatic should always be synonymous with end-to-end transparency – which requires a buy-side equivalent.
In order to see change, we need to hold the industry at large, accountable – many players call themselves transparent, but there are few and far between that are truly accountable.
So what does true accountability look like?
Demanding a receipt for every programmatic transaction
Very few players have prioritised the need for trust restoration in our industry, and an actionable outcome of this is providing a receipt for every transaction. This comes in the form of log-level data sets which is all of the data that is relevant to a single impression – these include geo data, URLs, cookie IDs, time stamps, viewability levels, and transaction data. Armed with log-level data, a publisher or buyer can see exactly what is occurring in its digital ad supply chain.
It can see details on what fee each vendor in the chain takes from the amount the marketer bids on the inventory. Log-level data can also show details like whether an exchange is running multiple bids on inventory on behalf of the same client – when they shouldn’t be – in order to make their match rates look better and also means they could in theory duplicate their take rates.
This programmatic-based method of accessing non-aggregated data provides publishers, buyers, and data providers the ability to build more personalised insights, run sophisticated data science projects or use customised and consolidated reporting products.
The question remains, why is this not a standard across the ecosystem?
Whilst these data-sets allow all parts of the supply chain to track investment and working media dollars, it’s not the status-quo – but it should be.
Holding ourselves accountable
This is also an opportunity to dig into best practices and ensure we’re all working towards being more accountable today, not tomorrow. The ultimate goal should be to educate every player in the ecosystem about the complexities of the supply chain and disclose the process of how automated advertising works.
If we continue to hold each other accountable for our actions, we can continue to propel one another forward, and create an ecosystem that’s truly rooted in trust.