According to the ANA and PwC, 70% of advertising dollars spent on online programmatic advertising never touch a human being.
Of $200 billion in annual programmatic ad spend, $140 billion disappears in"ad fees, fraud, non-viewable impressions, non-brand-safe placements, and unknown allocations" (by "unknown allocations" you can substitute "shit that no one can figure out.")
As a consequence, in 2021 the ANA announced they were commissioning an "in-depth study of the programmatic media-buying ecosystem." ANA CEO Bob Liodice said the adtech dreck-o-system is "riddled with material issues, including a lack of transparency, fractured accountability, and mind-numbing complexity."
The previous year I had written, "The ANA and/or the 4As should immediately institute and fund an independent commission to investigate the adtech industry -- the fraud, the social consequences, and the secrecy."
For years the the ANA has been talking out of both sides of its mouth -- whining about the sleaze of the adtech industry but tripping in its underwear with cockamamie, contradictory reports. The implimentation of this study was too little too late.
By the time the ANA report was issued in 2023, the ISBA in the UK had already made headlines revealing the wasteful, corrupt nature of the programmatic ad industry. The report, which took the ANA two years to release, was a non-event. All it did was verify what everyone with half a lobe already knew -- advertisers are being screwed blind by adtech ferrets.
One of the only interesting aspects of the ANA study was how the adtech industry stonewalled the ANA. According to Digiday,"'Vested interests' from some of the industry’s most powerful players have frustrated the project’s earliest ambitions."
Google, by far the largest player in online advertising, was particularly uncooperative. According to AdExchanger, there was "a woeful gap in terms of vendor participants. The ANA needs vendors onboard for the report to really work. There were 67 advertisers interested in participating...but only the 21 had legal rights to secure necessary log-level data from their vendors. Sometimes, the advertiser doesn’t own the data (despite being generated by the ad budgets) or it isn’t contractually available."
This is just a complicated way of saying that just about everyone in the programmatic supply chain is playing keep-away -- working hard to keep the system as opaque as possible.
The ANA's EVP Bill Duggan had this to say,“We thought it would be to the benefit of all of the supply chain participants to be noted in the report....Everyone says they are supporters of transparency, until they’re the ones asked to be transparent.”