Help wash the dirt out of digital, clients urged
Santander’s Keith Moor
A leading advertising client has called on other brands to step up and take a greater role in helping to solve some of the problems that plague digital advertising.
Santander’s chief marketing officer, Keith Moor, said persuading advertisers to take part in key industry committees tackling issues such as ad fraud, brand safety and viewability was like “pulling teeth”, and was contributing to ill-health in some areas of online advertising.
Speaking at a Mediatel debate hosted in partnership with comScore on Thursday (26 May), Moor said: “The bottom line is, [clients] are the money. We fuel the industry, so it’s entirely within our gift to help sort the problems we see in digital.”
Alongside ISBA, Santander is one of only five clients that sit on the Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards (JICWEBS), which is helping to develop independent standards for measuring performance online and benchmarking best practice for online ad trading.
Meanwhile, advertisers are expected to lose an estimated $7.2 billion globally this year as a result of ad fraud – while fraud, bots and poor viewability rates mean around 60% of digital advertising budgets are being wasted.
Yet despite the growing concerns, investment in online advertising is only set to grow, creating a paradoxical dilemma for the industry.
Last year, internet adspend increased 17.3% to £8.6 billion in the UK, with mobile accounting for 78% of that growth, growing 61.1% to a total of £2.6 billion.
Agenda21’s Pete Robins
Moor said that almost half of his entire marketing budget was now spent online, and despite his concerns that digital was becoming an increasingly “dirty” place to advertise for many brands, he did have a solution to make it a safer and more effective channel.
“Digital is extremely effective…only because I put people behind it to make it effective. I work with specialists to try and make our investment fully accountable. We learn about and understand agencies and their trading desks; we have bespoke black lists for different campaigns – it’s about buying enough resource and making enough effort. Data can’t solve your problems if you’re not willing to put any human effort into it.”
comScore’s Martin Bromfield
Elsewhere in the debate, Moor said that clients should also resist becoming “patsies” in the client/agency relationship.
“If agencies tell them what to do and they don’t ask any questions, it’s the client’s fault,” he said. “And I’m being deliberately forthright about this because I want more agencies to get involved to help sort this out.”
On the agency side, Pete Robins, founder of agenda21, added that too many clients “do not care where agencies spend their money”, and “if clients don’t ask, then they can’t complain.”
However, a solution to many of digital advertising’s problems can be found in technology and data, said Martin Bromfield, VP advertising EMEA, comScore.
“Although digital advertising has evolved into a largely efficient programmatic system, the flip-side is that advertisers do not always know where their ads are being placed,” he said.
“A lot of the ways we do this is going to be generated around data tech – and that will mean a win-win for both sides. The seller can realise more value in what they sell; the buyers will get a much better return on investment and gain trust in the system.”
Bromfield said some of the ways advertisers can do this is by building trust through verified impressions, independent audience validation and by serving ads that are relevant to content.
“You need to be asking as an advertiser: have you independently validated your audiences, and do you have a very deep contextualisation engine there that can really do a good job of matching my ads to the content.”
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Digital detergent: how to make online advertising a safer place – with views from The Financial Times, Santander, Agenda21 and comScore.