How agencies and clients can work to reverse programmatic transparency distrust
Since 2014 transparency has been one of the biggest buzzwords around programmatic advertising as advertisers began to ask agencies tougher questions about how and where their money was being spent. But as 2015 draws to a close, how far along has the debate moved and how can agencies be more proactive in educating clients to reverse those issues and increase advertiser confidence?
“As an advertiser the difficulty has been in that some of things that we didn’t look at as transparency issues before, you can now,” said Sammy Austin, head of marketing at TUI Group, as she hosted a panel at The Drum’s Programmatic Punch event in London today (8 December). “So potentially at the start there was the perception that agencies were hiding things from us, which is why now advertisers want to know more.”
This challenge is something that some agencies are now addressing head on. ZenithOptimedia has recently begun to roll out training events for those in procurement roles to help its clients understand the technology and what the market is going to turn in to. “It’s not a channel, it’s actually a way of buying the media, so what they need to be confident with is the terminology,” said James Hudson, head of digital at ZenithOptimedia. “That’s part of the transparency thing, getting the clients in, explaining to them and getting clients talking to each other as well.”
Within the transparency debate, advertisers have been raising question marks over the choice of agency technology partners and calling for more flexibility to choose their own partners and use the agency to deploy that technology, according to Austin.
“Within programmatic one of the perceptions of an advertiser is that an agency will use their preferred partners to run programmatic campaigns and not necessarily that benefit the advertiser but more the agency,” she said as part of a question pitted at the panel which also included Infectious Media co-founder and CEO Martin Kelly and Danny Hopwood, VP solutions and platform operations, Vivaki. While Hudson disagreed and said that client and agency should collaborate and help choose the technology partner should they wish to as part of that conversation, Kelly said that advertisers should be buying in to an agency’s choice of partners.
“As an agency we make a choice and advertisers make the decision of whether they want to work with you,” he said. “So an advertiser is buying into the choice of partners that you use… but there is another side to it and there are financial incentives to using a certain piece of technology and if that is the primary motivation to using the tech that is the wrong decision, but it’s difficult for advertisers to understand when and where that is happening and that’s led to mistrust in the market.”
However if a client is insistent on using a particular provider, the agency should compare them to their own preferred partners in a transparent way for the advertiser, added Hopkins. “The agency should be saying we will take that partner that you want to use, we will put them through our own evaluation process internally and stack them up against everyone else that we use and you can choose which one you want. But you need to see the positives and the negatives in the wider picture which doesn’t happen that often.”
Elsewhere, a new study revealed at the event found that in 2016 the percentage of digital advertising delivered programmatically in the in UK will rise from 59 per cent to 70 per cent, while UK spend will hit £2.46bn in 2016, up from £1.8bn this year.
Bill Fisher, analyst at eMarketer, which carried out the research, said that the appeal for marketing companies lies in the transparency and brand safety associated with programmatics's one-to-one nature, versus real-time buying through open exchange or public marketplaces: "A lot of concerns shared were less about money and getting the best deal and the best price.
"The fear is (with RTB) you could not be sure what's going to go on, which leads to fears over brand safety."
Words by Natalie Mortimer and Katy Young