Why the ANA's Programmatic Report Was 30 Years Late

As digital media has grown, there is ever-increasing coverage within the advertising industry about the failing state of media and creativity. Much of it is justified. But much of it also focuses on things that only matter to advertising.?

Advertising generally lives within media. Media can shape public opinion, influence elections, and drive social behavior, things that matter to society. But today opinions and societal effects get negatively manipulated, polarization replaces debate and vague perspectives are served up as news or facts to capture people’s attention. This happens because attention can be monetized via advertising.?

Advertisers are the customers of the media. It is their dollars that predominantly fuel this attention economy. As customers of the media, if we collectively added a bigger, societal lens to the way we think about what is broken in advertising, not only could we positively change media today but all the issues that get the coverage; wasted money, fraud, bad creative, pointless data costs, could also be significantly diluted.

The ANA’s 2022 report, The CMO’s Guide to Programmatic, felt timely and maybe even revolutionary. But a lot of the issues raised are not new. Sections of newspapers that expanded in the 90s or cable TV stations that multiplied in the 2000s were Made For Advertising (MFA’s). That term didn’t exist as recently as 2020, but building media properties that primarily capture traffic and ad revenue, not people, is not a new business model. We didn’t put guardrails around these things 30 years ago and as programmatic has become the predominant way to distribute advertising, those same issues are amplified.????

The ANA’s report estimates that only half of every dollar goes into showing an ad. That may well be but it is easy to make the same argument for legacy media. There was less advertising, it was easier to claim effectiveness and the formats were limited so inefficiencies were tolerated.

The difference now is that the places to drop ads into are seemingly infinite. And like any other category, as volume goes up, quality comes down.?Digital makes fraud more accessible and the capture of budgets less ethical. But the ambiguity around where marketing dollars now land has a bigger impact than just advertising effectiveness. It allows the owners of those media platforms to manipulate and monetize what counts as attention with no concern as to the negative impact on people.?

THE RISE OF UGLY CREATIVITY

The internet promised many things for marketing. Web 1.0 was a poor cousin to legacy media. News media sites were PDFs of physical newspapers and social media platforms like Myspace or Friendster required an appetite for personal art projects, not posts.?

Web 2.0 created real interaction, lightning speed and such mass complexity in media choices that made it impossible for a human being to stay on top of all the options out there. So algorithms made them for us.???

The internet also splintered budgets. Since the 1920s advertising has been between 1.5% and 2.0% of GDP. But the sheer volume of media properties the digital revolution delivered means that investment can be spread pretty thin.?

Advertising still just fills the holes that publishers and networks can monetize. We continue to sell and buy ideas as 30” scripts as the core of a creative concept. But the internet demands banners. And like it or not, those crappy little posters and videos are the workhorses of revenue generation for the media but get minimal, if any, human creative attention.????

This ugliness is not just advertising’s creativity. Legacy media originally required content and personalities to be the least controversial. If you upset folks too much when there were three TV networks, you could lose half your audience. Today, the scale in content available, professional or otherwise, flips that principle on its head and now often the most controversial personality wins. Advertising doesn’t just fund this attention economy. It is the reason it exists.??

WHAT TO DO

Wasted budgets are within the control of anyone spending marketing money. Media agencies and a lack of transparency get the negative press. Whilst that is also justified, the internet accelerated a whole new industry of budget skimming under the guise of data, accountability and targeting. The ANA’s report mentions that vendors in the ad tech space have expanded from about 150 in 2011 to between 8,000 and 9,000 today. All chipping away at that 1.5% to 2.0% GDP figure.

Understanding waste means stop measuring the internet and start measuring soft and hard business outcomes. Equity and sales. Media is a utility to generate those outcomes. The secret is not a black box. It is consistency in how data is organized, the quality of that data, the match rates of data used in activating target profiles, and things like naming conventions in reporting.

That is a laughably simple summary but attribution is about math and statistics. The more you can trust what you are looking at, the more confident you can be in correlations and decisions made.?

Course correcting the societal impact is harder. Digital media alone is not the culprit for the situation we find ourselves in. There are many businesses, creators and a world of positive content that would not have been possible without the internet.

But there are profound examples where financial gain takes precedence over ethical responsibility in the media. The pressure that shut down the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) was suggested as appropriate because GARM just focused on brand safety. But GARM was about more than that. It was created to ensure media content is aligned with responsible advertising practices, and to avoid the prioritization of profits over the negative consequences that arise from unchecked media.?

Particularly in the US, financial interests in the media often masquerade as protecting the right to free speech. In 1942 the government ruled that fighting words are not protected by The First Amendment's guarantee of free speech. It is not hard to see where the dynamics of the attention economy often result in content that incites fighting words but is dressed up as free speech.?

At the heart of all of this is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. It was written for Web 1.0 and is woefully ineffective for anything after that.

Changing Section 230 can be as simple as a ruling that reduces algorithmic amplification of content based solely on engagement metrics - likes, comments, shares etc. Instead algorithms focus on quality signals like credibility, source trustworthiness and implementing systems that favor verified, high quality contributions.?

This will need complex lobbying but bodies like the ANA and the 4A’s can collaboratively be at the heart of a drive for better standards within the places advertisers spend billions of dollars.

Like luxury brands, we could apply scarcity principles to media; fewer impressions but each is more expensive. This is hard as it is a fine line between collusion and collaboration. But instead of making all media like the classified sections of old, imagine if you had shorter ad breaks but they cost more, web and mobile ad spaces that focused on aesthetics and impact rather than serving you 26 sh***y ads while you try and navigate a single paragraph.?

Charlie Munger’s quote, ‘show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome’ is the filter for where we are in media. The incentive is generating profit from attention economy dynamics. So, of course today's outcome looks like it does.?

But, put in some basic human filters that would apply to regular face-to-face conversations and the outcome is less likely to be ever-increasing outrage. And we’d go some way to tidying up the issues raised by the ANA’s report along the way.