Cleaning up the digital media ecosystem

Following on from Marc Pritchard of P&G’s speech at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting — in which he lambasted the state of digital advertising and called for all parts of the marketing industry to work together to clean up the media supply chain — we hosted a breakfast roundtable to see how this resonated with key players from across the UK media industry.

The event gathered senior executives from AOL, Guardian Media Group, JOE Media, the IAB, MediaSense, MailOnline, Maxus, MSix, Sky, Snapchat, Telegraph Media Group, Trinity Mirror, and Videology. The room agreed with Pritchard’s call for a clampdown on advertising fraud, the need for a common viewability standard, verified third-party measurement, and greater transparency for agency contracts — but saw no easy solutions.

A key issue is the dominance of Google and Facebook, who between them took 99% of all revenue growth in the industry last year. These financial realities of digital advertising force the rest of the industry into price and ‘value’ sensitivity, rather than allowing it to focus on quality. This is apparent across the ecosystem, from a continued reliance on content syndication platforms which serve poor quality adverts, to the lack of transparency in agency contracts and regular re-pitches which continually refocus the conversation around cost.

In his speech, Pritchard also announced that P&G was adopting the Media Ratings Council (MRC) standard on viewability, and would expect all its agencies and media suppliers to follow them. Participants argued that although this is a good starting point to ensure consistent measurement between campaigns, optimising for viewability over impact can encourage advertising formats that hamstring the user experience, and prioritise advertising over quality content.

We would like to thank our attendees for a lively discussion, and will watch developments in this sector with great interest over the coming months.