Advertisers have become much more demanding buyers, heeding a number of best practices and insisting on only verified ad inventory, demanding viewability, and only buying when prices are fully transparent.
Many ad-tech platforms have pretended to move in exactly this direction, and some actually have. But relying on external agencies and/or various adtech suppliers is still leaving many ad buyers with a sense of inequity, and causing many to take their programmatic and buying in-house. In fact, Juniper research suggests the global cost of ad fraud will more than double to US$44 billion by 2022.
Australia is behind the rest of the world in that there’s not hard and fast legislation yet to prevent ad fraud. There’s ‘guidelines’ and ‘best practice’, and associations can only assist by lobbying to the Government or the ACCC and providing principles to follow.
And while many clients and buyers are agency-savvy and know to demand transparency, and some are taking it in-house, some are still a little lost when it comes to asking the right questions to get the best results from agencies and ads alike.
Fortunately, there are a number of organisations to help point buys and users in the right direction.
In 2018, the Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA), the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), and Media Federation of Australia (MFA), released a set of digital practice guidelines which aim to define the areas of responsibility and requirements for all involved in digital advertising to improve the online consumer experience.
The 25-page guide covers digital transparency, viewability, ad fraud, and data protection, and aims to re-establish trust in the industry following the fraud scandals.
The fact is, advertisers and buyers should not have to wrestle with suppliers. They need to be empowered, and the best way of achieving this is by seeking out the support and collaboration of industry groups and specialist organisations for guidelines and best practice for media, agencies, and clients.
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