What do toasters have in common with transparency and standards for online advertising?
Quite a lot, actually, says Ben Hovaness, chief media officer at OMD Worldwide, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
The more you can trust companies to conform to a set of online advertising standards – the way you trust electronics companies to make toasters that don’t burst into flames – the less transparency you need.
People feel safe with a toaster because they’re aware that accepted standards exist regulating the design and sale of electronics. They don’t need to see an electrical engineering diagram or exact specs to trust it.
The same logic applies – or should – to online ad auctions, which operate in a complex and opaque ecosystem of supply, demand and, well, confusion.
In 2020, OMD launched an initiative called the Council on Accountability and Standards in Advertising (CASA). Its projects include creating clear and simple standards for ad auctions, retail media and media quality more broadly.
Last year, Hovaness reached out to the Media Rating Council to create a working group for ad auction standards, recruiting stakeholders from across the ecosystem, including buyers, sellers, platforms, ad tech companies, industry orgs and other holding companies.
The group expects to put out an ad auction standard later this year.
“We realized that we were never going to have any success on this without partnering with industry,” Hovaness says. “The way to create a standard is to do the painstaking, long-term work of putting together a broad buy-side coalition that can develop [something] that will actually achieve broad adoption.”
Also in this episode: Ad auctions and game theory, CES takeaways, the case for – and against – principal-based media buying and tips on how to evaluate AI-powered advertising tools when they operate as black boxes (which is most of the time).
For more articles featuring Ben Hovaness, click here.
