Joshua Lowcock will be speaking at AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO conference on May 21 in Las Vegas. Click here to register.
Quad Media President Joshua Lowcock asks all ad tech partners for log files as a matter of course.
And if a company isn’t willing to hand them over, his antennae go up, he says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
“Log files are the ultimate arbiter of truth, and if people aren’t prepared to give me that, I assume that they’ve got something to hide,” says Lowcock. He joined Quad in October after nearly nine years in executive roles at IPG-owned UM Worldwide, including most recently as global chief media officer.
Log files contain information about every aspect of an ad impression, including exactly when an ad was served, where, the cost, views, clicks, conversions and who saw it. Armed with that level of transparency into the programmatic supply chain, advertisers can hold their partners accountable.
The ANA recommends advertisers get log-level data from every ad tech vendor they work with.
But even if a marketer doesn’t have the technical expertise to analyze the data themselves, there’s value just in the asking. Consider it like a litmus test for trustworthiness.
Lowcock, however, always goes a step further. If a partner says they’re willing to share, he then immediately asks them to send over a data sample from the most recent campaign.
And how often do they say yes to that?
“Companies are increasingly resistant to do that because, for better or worse, I have a reputation of calling things out,” Lowcock says. “I think they’re horrified and concerned of what I might discover just on sample data.”
Also in this episode: Leaving the agency holding company world for less morally dubious pastures, the fallacy of scale, healthy skepticism about the role played by the MRC and the third-party verification companies it accredits, what’s on Lowcock’s music playlist and his direct connection to Australian rock band INXS.
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