P&G’s Marc Pritchard on Cleaning up the Digital Supply Chain: “It’s Time for Action”
By: Mel Stern
Tags: Viewability, Programmatic, Fraud, Advertising, Digital Marketing

At the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting last week, Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer at Procter & Gamble, announced a series of steps the company will be taking to clean up the digital media supply chain in 2017.

“The days of giving digital a pass are over. It’s time to grow up. It’s time for action.” — Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer, Procter & Gamble

Pritchard’s program includes:

· A review of all media agency contracts after the company found a surprise in its dealings with at least one agency.

· Requirements that everyone use industry-standard viewability metrics, fraud protection, and third-party verification.

· To enforce these steps, the company has vowed to no longer pay for any digital media, ad tech company, agency or other supplier that doesn’t comply with its new rules.

It’s a big move from the world’s largest advertiser. By taking steps to fix the “complicated, non-transparent, inefficient and fraudulent” media supply chain, Pritchard is putting out a call to arms, encouraging the rest of the industry to follow its lead.

[Read more about Pritchard’s remarks here.]

If I had to boil Pritchard’s program down to one thing, it’s really all about risk.

Concerns about viewability are centered around the risk of an ad not being seen.

Fraud puts marketers at risk of potentially paying for impressions that were generated by bots instead of real people.

And his third-party verification requirement is about eliminating the risk of inaccurate reporting on a variety of digital campaign performance metrics.

What’s interesting about this is that risk is not unique to digital advertising. TV, the tried and true mainstay of advertising, is not without its own risks. Take the “bathroom risk,” for example. Sure, your ad may have run, and Nielsen may have verified that it ran against your target audience, but what percentage went to the bathroom during the commercial break? We can’t possibly know the answer to this question, yet we collectively accept the risk. It’s inherent in advertising.

Pritchard’s statements on digital advertising demonstrate both a degree of risk acceptance and a desire to mitigate it as much as possible. He insists that fraud — which is unacceptable in any shape and form — be eliminated as much as possible, but he also accepts the Media Rating Council’s viewability definition of 50% of pixels in view for one second — a standard that is far from perfect, but viewed as adequate.

I applaud Pritchard’s program and his leadership in tackling these issues head on. He’s creating an honest and open conversation between marketers, agencies, ad-tech and other suppliers about protecting advertisers’ digital investments, which is essential to delivering great digital ads — something the entire industry can get behind.

If the result of this conversation is on one hand, a collective acceptance of the benign risks inherent to digital advertising, and on the other, a vow to fight the malignant risks that confront the landscape, the industry as a whole will be in a much better position to tackle these challenges together.