Further comment from The Ozone Project's CEO, Damon Reeve, regarding the issues that have come to light as a result of the ISBA, PwC and AOP study…
Friday 8th May - first published on Mediatel
Full comment from Ozone’s CEO Damon below:
“The market is damn near impenetrable.” Phil Smith’s frustration, ISBA’s Director-General, is clear when describing the world of programmatic advertising. Yet this industry-wide study, driven by ISBA and bringing together the active roles of advertisers, vendors and publishers, should be seen as the first step in a positive trend in solving what has been a persistent problem for programmatic.
In a sector renowned for its structural opacity, this study highlights two major concerns beyond the reported results - which speak for themselves.
Firstly, if the best matched data yielded a 15% ‘unknown delta’, just how big might the ‘unknown delta’ be in the 88% of inventory that couldn’t be audited? The lack of integrity in data for a £100bn global industry is perplexing.
Secondly, the challenges in surfacing the right data for this study highlights clear confusion regarding who has the authority to share that information. In order to solve these issues, publishers and advertisers must be regarded as the principals or controllers of this data, with all other parties being agents or processors. Confusion regarding access to data simply muddies the chain and in itself becomes a major problem.
Overall, the need for greater transparency from an advertiser and publisher perspective is unquestionable, and it’s why we’re seeing both parties take a variety of their own measures to address this - Ozone being one example of that.
