NEW YORK: Marketers will all be aware that several major brands, such as Procter & Gamble and JPMorgan Chase, are no longer tolerating the inadequacies of digital advertising – and this is a development strongly endorsed by the IAB's CEO.
Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, said in a blog post that the industry has done a lot of work to improve matters since Marc Pritchard, P&G's Chief Brand Officer, demanded earlier this year that the advertising industry take action to deal with bad practice.
But Rothenberg said "there is much, much more left to be done" because "it's not just digital ad tech companies that are culpable – agencies, publishers, and the brands themselves bear responsibility".
Posting his comments on the same day that Pritchard reiterated his call for agencies to increase transparency and improve brand safety, Rothenberg praised the FMCG giant, one of the biggest advertisers in the world, for its tough approach.
"By putting its money on the line for standards compliance, Procter & Gamble launched a shot across the bow of [the] entire marketing-media ecosystem," he wrote.
Rothenberg also lauded JPMorgan Chase for its almost ruthless filleting of websites that once served its ads, cutting the total from around 400,000 to just 5,000 pre-approved sites.
He said JPMorgan Chase was following the programme he outlined at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Florida two months ago, when he told ad industry executives that it was up to them as individuals and their companies to "repair the trust".
"I have no doubt that P&G and JPMorgan Chase will be followed by a wave of big brands taking similar actions to secure the digital industry supply chain on behalf of brand and consumer safety," he predicted.
Throughout his blog, Rothenberg highlighted how pressing the issue of brand safety is, and he even made a startling comparison between the state of the current supply chain in advertising with the efforts the food industry makes to ensure its supply chain is safe.
Around 121bn cans of food and beverage are shipped around the US each year, he said, yet only one can is contaminated with botulism – or .00000000001% of all that are shipped.
By comparison, "between 3% and 37% of impressions are fraudulently generated by bots" and taken together with ads served on porn sites, falsified content or other inappropriate sites, then "the incidence of bad advertising is at least a few hundred billion times greater than the incidence of bad canned food".
Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, said in a blog post that the industry has done a lot of work to improve matters since Marc Pritchard, P&G's Chief Brand Officer, demanded earlier this year that the advertising industry take action to deal with bad practice.
But Rothenberg said "there is much, much more left to be done" because "it's not just digital ad tech companies that are culpable – agencies, publishers, and the brands themselves bear responsibility".
Posting his comments on the same day that Pritchard reiterated his call for agencies to increase transparency and improve brand safety, Rothenberg praised the FMCG giant, one of the biggest advertisers in the world, for its tough approach.
"By putting its money on the line for standards compliance, Procter & Gamble launched a shot across the bow of [the] entire marketing-media ecosystem," he wrote.
Rothenberg also lauded JPMorgan Chase for its almost ruthless filleting of websites that once served its ads, cutting the total from around 400,000 to just 5,000 pre-approved sites.
He said JPMorgan Chase was following the programme he outlined at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Florida two months ago, when he told ad industry executives that it was up to them as individuals and their companies to "repair the trust".
"I have no doubt that P&G and JPMorgan Chase will be followed by a wave of big brands taking similar actions to secure the digital industry supply chain on behalf of brand and consumer safety," he predicted.
Throughout his blog, Rothenberg highlighted how pressing the issue of brand safety is, and he even made a startling comparison between the state of the current supply chain in advertising with the efforts the food industry makes to ensure its supply chain is safe.
Around 121bn cans of food and beverage are shipped around the US each year, he said, yet only one can is contaminated with botulism – or .00000000001% of all that are shipped.
By comparison, "between 3% and 37% of impressions are fraudulently generated by bots" and taken together with ads served on porn sites, falsified content or other inappropriate sites, then "the incidence of bad advertising is at least a few hundred billion times greater than the incidence of bad canned food".
Data sourced from IAB; additional content by WARC staff
