What a funny world we live in when representatives from the trade press and trade bodies are happily chirping away at the dastardly trade desks. We are not transparent, we are sitting on hoards of gold, laughing into our hands at the lack of interest that advertisers are showing us. It is a money making extravaganza.

The first thing I would say is those same people were quite happy when their advertisers were throwing good money after bad at media companies with not the slightest inkling about where the money was going or how. No results, no insights, no controls on frequency, absolutely zero brand safety right up to advertising on illegal sites. Oh that’s fine because those companies delivering the Ads are not in an agency group. Even today there is a major RTB Ad Net that revealed in its financials that it makes over 60% margin..is that OK advertisers? Same people, same budgets – totally blind by the way.

Let me explain what we (we being AOD as not everyone is the same) have done, us terrible evil operators – we have brought transparency. Our advertisers know what is media and what is not. We have been stringent in brand safety terms with our VivaKi Verfied process so advertisers can make sure they are not being exposed to bad content. We have frequency controls so that the advertiser does not show their Ad 50 times and thus waste money. Our commercials mean that we are dedicated to finding the right user not managing an arbitrage or variable margin, everything we do is RTB, not upfront buying, not something most of the media companies can truly claim. We do not charge advertisers set cpm or set cpc – are you still accepting that? Well ask yourself why you would in an auction world? Because it is a nice safety net? Well that is your worst media procurement decision yet. No it is because those deals make their providers lots of cash and the advertiser has no idea how much.

I laugh out loud at the suggestion that we are not being scrutinised by auditors. Anyone who commits that to paper has clearly not spoken to anyone who works inside the relevant organisations. It is one of the most common conversations I have between ad hoc meetings and pitches. Have you seen a pitch document recently? No we are scrutinised, perhaps some are not, but we certainly are and I think it mocks the advertisers to say they are not focused on the subject. I know many who are, many.

The Trade desk has challenged the status quo, many of the companies have had to raise their game because they were being faced with a tide of Transparency, unearthing how they were doing business and continue to do so,  I am happy with that, I am happy we have changed things. I think it is a shame that there is not more open dialogue on the subject as opposed to people throwing stones from a position of ignorance.