Ready. Set. Action.

Earlier today I stumbled upon a post lamenting the progress marketers are not making in digital media. Yes, the ANA’s earth moving 2023 Programmatic Transparency study is circulating, again. The not-so-subtle rub is that advertisers are simply not acting to fix the problems.

It’s hard not to wonder what’s really happening inside the physical and digital walls of corporate marketing offices. Marketing leaders would have to be living under a rock not to have seen the headlines splashed across industry trades, social platforms, and in mainstream business news outlets.

Having spent 15+ years in client-side media leadership roles, I don't believe that anyone is sitting idle. But perceptions have consequences.

So, is there really no action?

Like most things, it depends.

The WFA publishes a global benchmark on viewability that is a composite of several major ad verification companies. The public data goes back to 2019 and reports through 2023. ?In 2019, viewability was 55% in display and 68% in video. In 2023, the percentages increased to 63% and 70% respectively. In the U.S., the gains in video were a bit more pronounced, from 64% to 71%.

Integral Ad Science’s (IAS) own Media Quality report confirms the above trend. The conflicting bit is that time-in-view is trending downward.

You mean my ads are more likely to be in view today, but they are in view for less time?

Exactly! Remember, the MRC’s definition of viewability is that just 50% of an ad must be in view for 1-second for display and 50% for 2-seconds for video.

The industry has gotten a bit better at optimizing to the MRC definition. Maybe it’s time to stretch a bit and advertisers should aim higher on the viewability ladder. Set your own minimums.

Okay, let’s look at Made for Advertising sites (MFAs). The ANA’s 2023 transparency study showed 21% of impressions measured landed on MFAs and this was 15% of spend. Prior to the release of its First Look report in June 2023, 54% of members surveyed had no clue what an MFA site was. Thanks to its relentless drumbeat, 75% of marketers surveyed were aware of MFAs following its initials publishing. But as my comms theory professor would say – awareness is not an objective. Its behavior change that creates results.

Enter Adalytics and their bombshell reports that outed several brands listed in the ANA’s initial report were still showing up on MFA sites.

There you have it. No action.

But Adalytics didn’t exactly quantify its gotcha moment. Perhaps this was just a rouge misfire happenstance. But even if that’s the case, I imagine it rightfully created plenty of discussion between the in-house and agency and verification partners who were called out and are paid handsomely to prevent this sort of thing.

But what are we doing to fix it? ?

The great folks at Jounce shared some good news on the prevalence of MFAs in the supply chain as part of their 2024 State of the Open web report. This wonderful little graph shows that MFA supply in bid requests is down from 30% before the ANA’s report to about half that 6 months later.

Progress at last!

The question is, should we eliminate this from the ad supply altogether? What are the implications in doing so? What are the implications of not? These are ethical and environmental questions as much as they are business questions. I’m not going to get into it today. But buyers have options and if you don’t want this in your inventory, you’ll need the right governance to ensure execution follows your intention.

But ad fraud.

The ANA projects that ad fraud will grow to $170 billion by 2028. In 2023, roughly 23% of ad spend was lost to fraud (Jupiter research). IAS’s Media Quality Report shares a similar alarming trend with the prevalence of fraud growing significantly from H1 2019 to H2 2023.

But why the delta between Jupiter’s estimate of 23% and IAS’s 1.40%?

IAS qualifies its number, saying that this is the reported fraud rate for “protected campaigns” that are “optimized against fraud”.

Some quick napkin estimates: if you’re a large national advertiser spending $600 million a year with a modest 60% going to digital, your annual ad fraud exposure is roughly $3-5 million, based on an average $12-20 CPM. That’s a healthy sum. But sadly, fraud doesn’t even show up as a leading concern among marketing executives. It should and there's really no excuse for apathy on this issue.

Alright, so where does this all land? ?

For one, progress is happening. Albeit slowly. The good guys are responding to the calls for action. The problem is that the bad guys are moving a lot faster – their incentives are a lot bigger. ?Ad Fraud is one area to be much more vocal on. Don't accept the 1-2% numbers being reported. Take a closer look at who you're partnering with throughout the supply path to separate the froth from the sediment below.

What else can advertisers do?

Poor execution and campaign miss management is one place to start.

When I was a younger agency side planner, a supervisor told me that a bad strategy executed brilliantly will almost always deliver some results. But a great strategy executed poorly is a recipe for failure.

Unfortunately, folks don’t make time for execution. We’ll critique every strategy slide in a PowerPoint, but once the buy authorization is signed, execution disappears into the operational deep end. This is where costly mistakes like serving ads outside intended geographies or dayparts, poor frequency management, improper tagging and pacing hide.

The good news is that these things are much more in your control – you just need to pay attention to the details so that you can ask your executional partners better questions.

These issues are not limited to digital. If you’re buying any linear TV, which I suspect is the case, you should be looking at how closely your linear TV buys adhered to your buying guidelines on competitive separation or overnight delivery? Better yet, when was the last time you updated your guidelines to fit your strategy? How often are your actuals missing plans? How well is your team recovering and managing ADUs, which have become commonplace in deals as networks over promise and under delivery on ratings.

So, while progress is happening. This “war” has many fronts. The best course of action for media leaders is to get closer to execution, benchmark what you're doing to your strategic intentions, and hold partners accountable to achieving better results.