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The year’s not over yet, but it’s probably safe to say that issues with digital advertising was very much the story of the year. Concerns about ad fraud, brand safety, ad tech transparency and many billions of wasted dollars have rightfully become a preoccupation for marketers around the world.

Those headaches were the motivation behind the ACA’s Executive Forum earlier this month – with the theme “Digital Redemption: Regaining Faith In Media Accountability.”

The ACA invited three preeminent industry leaders to the picturesque Corus head offices on Toronto’s waterfront to talk, in real terms, about what is being done to clean up a very messy digital supply chain, to restore the faith of advertisers and renew media credibility.

“There’s been lots of bad news,” said Chris Williams, ACA’s vice-president, digital. “The question is what is happening to make things better.”

Here is just some of what attendees heard.

The Importance Of Trust

The morning kicked off with a presentation from Jason Kint, CEO of New York-based Digital Content Next.

One of the fundamental flaws in the digital advertising ecosystem that emerged as automation took off was a lack of trust, arising from the increasing complexity of the system, he said. As more and more ad tech intermediaries got between the advertiser and publisher/consumer, it became almost impossible for advertisers to know where their budget was going and who was getting what.

“If you don’t know where the money is going, and you have got people in the middle who are for-profit companies trying to maximize their take, then of course there is more money going to the middle,” he said.

Today, according to DCN, less than 50% of every marketing dollar invested becomes working media.

DCN came up with a solution to this problem. A year ago, its board approved a bold experiment to rebuild the supply chain: a cooperative private exchange connecting advertisers to premium publishers with engaged audiences, but operating as a non-profit. “It had one purpose: to build a sustainable future for trusted advertising,” he said.

TrustX went live in June with more than 30 premium publishers like ESPN, Business Insider, Financial Times, The Daily Caller and Newsday. Soon after, the Association of National Advertisers gave the effort a boost by urging members to test drive the exchange and become part of the larger effort to clean up the system. There is total cost transparency from bid request through delivery, and 100% human and viewable impressions, or the advertiser doesn’t pay.

“They are literally resetting the supply chain on programmatic to solve for simplicity, scale and actually delivering the trust and the value that you expect.”

The Importance Of Authenticity

Kint was followed by Joan Brehl, vice president and general manager of the Alliance of Audited Media Canada. Brehl outlined the scope of the ad fraud problem for marketers and provided an unambiguous call-to-action.

Worldwide, there are about 329 million registered domains but just 11 million (3%) of them are legitimate, she said. That means more than 300 million illegitimate sites around the world, often plugged into programmatic exchanges, buying traffic and selling fake display impressions. “They are stealing money from the marketers and publishers. It is counterfeit, not unlike counterfeit handbags and watches.”

The problem has grown because marketers became so preoccupied with chasing audiences and impressions through programmatic buying that they lost control of it, allowing big chunks of their ad budget to flow right into the pockets of fraudsters running those illegitimate sites.

In response, some marketers have massively scaled back on the number of sites where they advertise. JPMorgan Chase went from 400,000 sites to just 5,000, “and to their surprise, there really was no significant change in effectiveness,” Brehl said.

In other words, marketers can be more selective about where their ads appear and select publishers that have been independently audited by a credible third party.

“My message to you as marketers is you must be persistently vocal about publishers getting AAM certification,” she said.

“In the war against ad fraud, we can do it but we have to distinguish quality publishers with human audiences from fraudulent sites.”

The Importance Of A Good View

The last speaker of the morning was George Ivie, CEO of the Media Rating Council. MRC has its roots in the 1960s but has been in the spotlight a great deal this year after Mark Pritchard, CMO of the world’s largest marketer, P&G, said he was tired of wasting money in digital in a January speech that reverberated across the industry.

“[W]e need objective, validated measurement to be sure that we’re getting the viewability, the audience, the reach and the frequency we pay for,” he said. For Pritchard, the best choice to provide that objective measurement was MRC. “So at P&G, we’re expecting every media supplier—including publishers and measurement vendors—to adopt MRC-accredited third-party measurement verification during 2017.”

The shift toward accepting MRC as the industry standard for viewability hasn’t been easy, said Ivie.

“We have caught a lot of spears. It is controversial and it is highly disruptive, but one thing it does do, it takes non-viewable ads out of the equation,” Ivie said. “In the U.S. alone, those ads were about 50% of the media supply chain. Marketers were paying for 50% of the ads that never had the opportunity to be seen. That was billions of dollars.”

Talking about fraud, Ivie said that while progress has been made in preventing the types of ad fraud we’ve heard so much about, new challenges emerge.

For instance, as protections and countermeasures improve, automated bot-fraud has been on the decline, but the fraudsters have shifted their approach.

“The problem is the bad guys shift. What they are shifting to is stuff that either looks like a human or is a human. They actually hire people out there in a country where they don’t pay a lot of money and they are there actually creating traffic.”

Machine takeovers are also an increasingly popular tactic of “the bad guys” and fraud is rising in the app space because that is where the money is flowing, he said. “It’s like a law of nature. Fraud follows high dollar transactions, and that is where it’s going.”

The Importance Of What’s Next

The morning wrapped with the three speakers retaking the stage to answer questions from the audience. The discussion covered everything from contract language to walled gardens to bad actors impersonating (and damaging) brands online. One attendee (we’re assuming a frustrated buyer) noted the pressure on media agencies to chase impressions at the lowest CPM, which makes it difficult to buy premium publishers.

But a lot of those clicks you’re getting at the low CPM aren’t even giving an actual viewable impression, said Kint.

“CPMs are higher with TrustX based on pure CPM perspective, but based on the viewability math it is very, very competitive and you know where your ads run when your CMO asks. You have got real answers now and I think that is worth something.”

The discussion concluded with a look toward the next big change coming to the industry, the imminent implementation of the GDPR in Europe (which if you haven’t heard about yet, you should read this).

Even if it is less relevant to marketers in Canada and U.S., it won’t be irrelevant, and whether it’s GDPR itself or other new privacy protections, the implications could be huge.

“I think there is significant change coming to our industry,” said Kint. “The ad tech ecosystem is going to get crushed by GDPR and the privacy regulations that are coming.”

It’s going to make everything harder for the industry for a little while, but from those challenges a big opportunity could emerge, he said.

“That may be uncomfortable for a lot of us. But what it is going to do is shore up the relationship with the consumer and the sites they choose to use and the advertisers that want to associate with it.”

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