(Matt Green, WFA Global Lead Media and Digital Marketing.WFA)
A study from the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) — a trade body that represents brands such as P&G, L'Oréal, and Emirates — found that nearly 90% of the advertisers it polled are reviewing their programmatic advertising contracts and demanding more control and transparency.
The WFA interviewed 59 of its members, who represent global ad spend of more than $70 billion. Around 16% of their budgets are spent on programmatic advertising, up from 10% in 2014.
Transparency in the programmatic advertising market has become a hot topic in recent years, given concerns around bots, ad fraud, and suppliers taking a "principle position," where they sell back media they have bought directly from publishers at a marked-up rate. Marketers are looking for reassurances that they are getting the right value for their advertising spend and that their programmatic suppliers are not taking too big a cut of their budgets that could be better spent elsewhere.
"We call it media transformation, where we're seeing our members in those media roles refreshing a lot of what they do. Part of that is about transparency and part of that is about technology," said Matt Green, the WFA's global lead for research.
But while many clients are reviewing their programmatic spending, Green explained the WFA was seeing many clients continue to use agency trading desks. The study found 29% of respondents were satisfied with the level of transparency offered by their agency trading desk, up from 21% in 2014.
According to the report, use of private marketplaces, where advertisers have a one-to-one relationship with a publisher, was on the rise. 67% of the WFA members said they were investing more into invite-only exchanges.
The survey also found that in-house trading desks were used by one in five of the WFA members, something that was only being conducted at the fringes of the WFA members two years ago.
P&G, a member of the WFA, is one of the big names to have brought programmatic buying in-house. L'Oreal, another member of the advertising organization, was reported by AdAge to be investigating building its own trading desk.
A number of large technology companies are also moving into the media buying space and providing software that enables advertisers to manage their own media buying without having to go through a middle man.
In 2016, German enterprise software company SAP launched the media buying platform Exchange Media, which says on its website that it enables "full transparency and simplified processes that increase overall efficiency by facilitating a unique direct real-time interoperation between advertiser and publisher." Adobe's Marketing Cloud solution also enables programmatic buying which it touts as a "truly transparent system."