The Online Ad World Is Murky. A Group of Companies Wants to Fix That

A group of 16 companies — including leading ad tech firms, ad agencies and publishers — is trying to help clean up the murky world of digital advertising.

On Wednesday, the companies called for more visibility into where each dollar is spent in the online advertising supply chain. They committed to standards and practices for sharing data on fees and authenticating content, and urged others to move in the same direction.

The move, industry executives and analysts say, is an effort to bolster digital advertising outside the domains of Google and Facebook, whose ad businesses are being scrutinized by federal and state investigators for anticompetitive behavior.

The group, which includes IBM and News Corporation, also hopes to apply pressure on the digital ad powers to pry open their “black box” marketplaces, by disclosing fees and other information.

Publishers routinely complain that the opaque nature of the digital ad pipeline is inefficient and expensive, with middlemen taking an outsize share of ad spending. Newspaper and magazine publishers, by some estimates, collect only 30 to 40 cents of every dollar spent on their ads online, compared with about 85 cents in the pre-internet days.

“We’re trying to create new terms of trade to modernize the business,” said Joe Zawadzki, chief executive of MediaMath, an ad tech company. “Seeing where every dollar goes — that doesn’t exist today.” .….[Read More]