P&G’s chief brand officer, Marc Prichard went on the defensive this past week, saying that he would be reviewing all of its contracts with agencies, in order to find where extensive fraud was occurring and that most of the media they currently buy is crap.
“P&G believed the myth that we could be the latest mover on all the new shiny objects despite the lack of standards in measurement and verification,” said chief brand officer Pritchard at the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Florida.
He said that that online media, the supply chain of DSPs and networks is “murky at best” and “fraudulent at worst,” and because of that they will demand that their media is clean and productive.
“We need to clean it up and invest the time and money we save into better advertising for growth,” he added. Better advertising and media transparency are very closely related, he said. This is because “better advertising requires time and money” and yet advertisers are “wasting too much time and money on a media supply chain with a poor standards of option.”
“Craft or crap. That’s really the big question and technology enables both,” said Prichard “All too often the outcome has been crappy advertising, accompanied by even crappier viewing experiences.”
He shared the company’s plans to take action to clean up the media supply chain and encouraged the industry to apply the steps to their own business. There were four points he clearly highlighted on the IAB US website were:
- Firstly, the company plans to adopt one viewability standard: one MRC-validated viewability standard.
- Secondly, the company plans to implement accredited third-party measurement verification. This means that very media supplier, including publishers and measurement vendors, are expected to adopt MRC-accredited third party verification during 2017.
- Thirdly in order to get transparent agency contracts the company is now reviewing every agency contract.
- Fourthly, to prevent ad fraud the company is insisting that any entity touching digital media must become TAG-certified during 2017.
