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Last week, Procter & Gamble\u2019s chief brand officer, Marc Pritchard, gave a speech at the IAB’s annual leadership event in Florida.<\/p>\n
While there has been an enormous amount of discussion concerning media transparency recently, there has\u00a0 been very little meaningful action. However, this all changed in a 25 minute speech where Marc Pritchard openly & clearly explained what P&G is going to do in 2017 to change this, and in doing so, potentially altered\u00a0the direction of media forever.<\/p>\n
He delivered four simple but extremely powerful key points.<\/strong><\/p>\n Firstly, he talked to inconsistent digital viewability standards. He compared the current situation to a football game in which each team sets their own definitions of a goal, essentially levelling his guns at the\u00a0disparate viewability approaches of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, Pandora, YouTube and others. He announced that P&G would combat this inconsistency by adopting the Media Ratings Council (MRC) standard, and would expect all its agencies and media suppliers to follow suit before the end of the year. While this is still quite a low bar, it does set a new standard for vendors like Facebook who choose to define an impression as “more than zero” seconds watched.<\/p>\n Secondly, and in what could be considered the most radical part of the speech, he decried the closed measurement systems of Google and Facebook. Pritchard suggested that this is equivalent to having the “fox in the henhouse”, and that P&G will\u00a0no longer accept publisher self-reporting without some form of external verification. He asserted that by the end of the year, P&G will expect all its partners to adopt third-party, MRC accredited verification of audience numbers.<\/p>\n Thirdly, he addressed ad fraud in the world of programmatic, and specifically the long list of vendors who each\u00a0\u201cpunch their ticket\u201d and take a significant share of the client\u2019s media investment long before it ever reaches a publisher or platform. Of this, Pritchard said, \u201cWe serve ads to consumers through a non-transparent media supply chain with spotty compliance to common standards, unreliable measurement, hidden rebates and new inventions like bot and methbot fraud.\u201d His solution is that P&G will adopt the guidelines of the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), which includes the ANA, IAB and the 4A’s.<\/p>\n \n Get exclusive insights into digital \n \n \n Stay Forward <\/h2>\n
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