Nick Manning, the chief strategy officer at marketing analytics firm Ebiquity, has argued the international media and marketing industry is far further from a programmatic panacea than many would like to believe.
Manning, famously a co-founder of media agency Manning Gottlieb Media (Manning Gottlieb OMD), is speaking at M&M Global and Exchange Lab’s breakfast briefing next week (Wednesday 4 November).
The event, exclusively for brand marketers, will also feature sessions from InterContinental Hotels Group marketer Fabrizio Di Martino and Oracle Marketing Cloud’s Zuzanna Gierlinska. Click here for more details on speakers and how to attend.
Discussing the state of programmatic media with M&M Global, Manning argues that clients must work through a number of issues – including viewability, ad fraud and reporting transparency – before they can feel confident about the impact of such technology.
“Things are improving as people get more experienced, and we do see some very good examples of how this can work well,” said Manning. “But the average level of ad viewability has been roughly the same for years, so we’re not seeing much improvement in technical terms.
“If programmatic is about showing the right ad to the right people, and nearly 70% ads are basically being shown to the same people, I’m not entirely sure yet that there is as much true programmatic activity going on as we’re led to think.”
“Part of the problem is the base currency of impressions and CPMs – there is no in-built mechanic to reward effectiveness”
With the debate on viewability rumbling on, Manning says it is the responsibility of every advertiser to pressure their agency over viewability rates, and to ensure half of their media investment is not wasted.
One of the key issues for improvement in 2016, he adds, is the level of reporting on offer to advertisers: “It is frustrating for clients. They feel they should be drowning in data, but there is a relatively low level of reporting.”
As a long-time agency leader himself, Manning has called on agencies to do more to help clients understand where there money is going. “Agencies need to be a whole lot more transparent, because they’re not at the moment,” he said.
“It is also a well-known fact that, for every dollar an advertiser spends, half goes in fees and technical costs before it even reaches the publisher – that is even before we reach viewability. The majority of our clients do not have contracts which allow them to see the full details of those costs.
“Part of the problem is the base currency of impressions and CPMs – there is no in-built mechanic to reward effectiveness. The other part of the problem is this an enormously lucrative business. Without checks and balances in place, it could be argued there isn’t a regime for making [the industry] more accountable.”
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