The terror of transparency

The fact that Google and YouTube placements of adverts from proper brands can mean household names being improperly associated with terror, pornography and all manner of perversion has belatedly become a hot topic for marketers.
Clients that care about their reputation on a deep level (not all do) are violently waking up to the fact that digital media is not only not free, its abuse is very expensive indeed.
To be fair, there is more than enough complicity, blame and bullshit bouncing around to hit every part`of the game — hard. This is about a trashing of basic transparency by three odious levels of opacity.
Firstly, we have the oversold, misunderstood and far from transparent reality of online media itself.
One of the most toxic marketing ideas of the last twenty years is that digital is almost kind of free on the one hand, yet is so magic on the other that it cannot fairly be subjected to the accountability clients demand from all other mediums.
Accountability, as in being able to answer barely basic questions such as:
- Did my ad run?
- Did it look and sound the way you promised it would?
- Was it visible to anyone?
- Where, when and why did it appear?
- Can you promise that it was not shown next to jihadi gore porn or racist rantings?
The surprisingly sleepy giants of tech and the ever compliant agency gang have abused the delusions of digital in order to duck out of responsibility.
Few have cared about what they are promising, selling, or buying. Or what level of transparency they demand from or offer to their partners and clients.
Secondly, we have the two mammoths that increasingly eat, and serve, most of the media pie refusing to recognise their real role, admit their limitations to customers, or even set out a roadmap to answer the worst of the questions above.
Google and Facebook have long seen themselves, and self identify as, ‘tech’ companies.
This means being a passive provider of pipes and services, like the phone network. If you abuse the telephone — most commercial and criminal responsibility is yours. The network provider can be forced by law enforcement or else scared by the spooks to hand over the detail, but rightly, rarely is penalised for unforeseen malicious use of the data stream.
A media company, however, is held to account by its customers for what it runs, how, where and why.
As Sir Martin Sorrell and even more angry luminaries have said, pleading ‘we are just a pipe’ denies the power of and responsibility owed by the firms that are the home page of billions of people.
It is not, and never was, good enough.
The final layer worsens the whole absence of transparency like a tonne of black ink thrown into a mud puddle. It is the crushing, corrupting co-dependency at the heart of too many big agency and client relationships.
Both sides are under, and put themselves and each other under, extraordinary pressure to deliver incredible results from barely credible investment levels against deadlines that would leave a trusted advisor incredulous.
Big agencies have been compliant, complicit, ignorant and completely negligent about digital placement and brand integrity. Clients have been given the easy, sexy and wrong answers about digital for so many years they often believe them more than the agencies do themselves.
This is not a new story. The rot started when ad tech promised targeted reach on digital that was cheap to nearly free, and automatic.
Private Eye, the UK based satirical news magazine, (which everyone should subscribe to) has had a column called ‘Malgorithms’ for years.
‘Malgorithms’ are when the too cheap to measure but oh so accurate automated digital media buy systems do things like advertise holidays from an airline or country that has just suffered a major terrorist attack next to a story about the massacre. Or cookware against a story about a murder involving someone being bludgeoned with said kitchen accessory. This has been going on for a very long time. But until now, many have seen it as a bit of a laugh.
It remains to be seen, sadly, if the angry screams and suspended investment from some of the biggest clients on earth begins to scrub some sunlight and sense into this three layered settling pond.
