COLOGNE — Over the last couple of years, both advertising buyers and sellers alike have cried foul over alleged nefarious practices, high margins and unseen misdeeds on the part of intermediaries.
A host of initiatives has risen to combat the lack of transparency, some of them from vendors and agencies themselves accused of hiding ad spending strategies.
But IAB UK chief digital officer Tim Elkington thinks trade bodies like his own are in prime position to help.
“The message that I would give to the buy side, is that actually trade bodies like the IAB, like JICWEBS, like all of the industry bodies getting together, we’re really working hard to clean everything up,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“So I’d say to the buy side, work with us, support all of those things that we’re doing, so we can make the industry a better place for everyone.”
Accusations ave been levelled against agencies, for apparently hiding rebates and margins which have seen them hold on to as much as 20% of clients’ media spend, and ad-tech platforms, for pricing unfairly and for similarly holding on to money that never goes toward media.
Elkington was speaking at DMEXCO, the digital ad industry gathering in Germany, where the topics of transparency and fraud were high on the agenda.
In the US, IAB’s TechLab has introduced Ads.txt, a new initiative in which a file placed on a publisher site lists the sources that are allowed to sell their ad inventory.
In the UK, JICWEBS, the Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards, has been auditing platforms for compliance with transparent practices, whilst ISBA, representing hundreds of leading brands, has issued a new template contract it is urging buyers to sign with intermediaries like platforms and agencies, writing transparent practices in to agreed business law.
“Hopefully that momentum will just keep building, and then eventually it will be impossible for the fraudsters to be able to pass off their sort of spoofed or faked inventory as a sort of real, genuine site,” Elkington adds.
This video was produced as part of Beet.TV leadership series from DMEXCO, presented by NBCUniversal. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
