What are the standards and recommendations for building a more transparent, trustworthy supply chain and how do you encourage their adoption?
Emil Mathias, Partnerships Account Director for MediaMath, recently participated in the IAB Australia’s Digital AdOps Webinar – Part 3: Transparency, Ad Fraud & Brand Safety with IAB AU moderator Jonas Jaanimagi, Adele Wieser of Index Exchange, Jessica Miles of Integral Ad Science, Malcolm Murdoch of ANZ and Jill Wittkopp and Amit Shetty of IAB Tech Lab to discuss this on a global scale.
“What we are hearing from marketers is that brands themselves don’t closely examine [the standards],” said Mathias. “They look to agencies or in-house activation teams to be up to date with them. Rather than brands proactively ensuring their supply chain is using the most up-to-date standards, it’s major events like ICEBUCKET and DrainerBot where we saw more inquiries around requirements. Now we’re seeing increasing interest in supply path optimization and supply chain transparency. As we see the industry move more toward transparency, we expect marketers to take more control in understanding those standards.”
Wittkopp of the IAB Tech Lab says that marketers don’t necessarily need to know all the details of their supply chain, but their tech providers certainly should.
“They should be able to trace a piece of inventory and be able to see the hops that were made in a given transaction before they were ultimately purchased from a publisher and be able to help give that assurance to their agency partners or direct brands,” she said.
Brand safety presents its own separate but related challenge in the supply chain, said Murdoch of ANZ.
“Overall I don’t feel like from a marketing perspective we want to talk about brand safety and equally I feel that we don’t have the space where we are looking at other brands and saying those brands are really good at brand safety.
“The financial transparency is slightly separate from brand safety. But we still need to be in a speed where we need to talk to people about where money is going and a level of certainty where we know where that money ends up and who is getting a slice of the pie.”
Wieser of Index Exchange said, “Transparency is only part of the equation.”
“The second step is obviously accountability. I can go out and say that I’m transparent, but unless I’m completely accountable for my actions and my promises to my clients and my partners, that transparency may not hold up,” she said.
“From that, there is a lot more education and I think everyone needs to do a general upskilling in terms of their understanding of the players, how they are contributing to that transparency in the industry and feeling that they have that level of accountability and they can hold their partners accountable.”
This is where an initiative like SOURCE, our cross-industry collaboration to build a 100 percent accountable, addressable and aligned ecosystem, comes into play, said Mathias.
“The driving belief is that it should drive more trust in programmatic and benefit both the buy- and sell-sides,” he explained. “Through SOURCE, we’re seeing 26 billion ad impressions in APAC a month, improved CPMs and metrics like viewability and pubs are getting increasing shares of media budgets.”
Watch the full panel recording below.