Woolley Marketing: Is the path for media going backwards or forward?

Have you noticed that the Democratic Party has framed the current presidential race in the US as a choice between going back to a repressive past with the Republicans and a drive to a more optimistic future? Interestingly, a similar dichotomy is evolving in the media and advertising world.

Faced with continued and growing issues with the digital media ecosystem, including ad fraud, brand safety, fake impressions, and more, a group of concerned media and marketing citizens wants to bring about changes that will instil a greater level of transparency, accountability, and honesty in the business of planning and buying media.

This concern is framed by the inference that media has become significantly less ethical with the growth of digital media and that we need to return to a model that provides more accountability and, therefore, greater performance and value.

This view is based on at least two assumptions. The first is that the ways of media in the past were somehow better and that it is worth returning to this nostalgic existence. The second is that we can even go back to that time, considering that most of the changes have been driven by massive investments in technology by trillion-dollar publicly listed companies that could buy and sell all of adland’s major holding companies they are doing business with.

Irrespective of the outcomes of the anti-trust actions taken by the US government against Alphabet/Google, the tech companies, including Meta, Bytedance, Amazon, Apple,  X, and increasingly NVIDIA, all have significant power and resources to maintain the status quo. If the might of what is considered the most powerful government in the world is struggling to tame these tech players, what hope is there for the advertising industry?

Illustration by Dennis Flad.

Elon Musk’s X taking legal action against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) and a selection of major advertisers associated with this initiative back in August is a demonstration of how far the technology oligarchs are able and willing to go to protect their rivers of advertising gold.

Suggesting that it is possible to return the media market to those good old days of transparency and trust is like King Canute standing at the ocean’s edge, trying to hold back the tide.

In the face of apparent futility, there is an alternative perspective best summarised in the old joke about two friends camping out in the wilderness. They see a lion running toward them, and one of the men responds by sitting down to lace on his running shoes. His friend exclaims, "Are you crazy? You'll never outrun the lion!" To which the first man replies, "I don't have to outrun the lion. I only have to outrun you."

The point is that, like the media ecosystem, it is too big and too powerful to stop, so we need to adapt to make the most of the situation. Speak with the smarter media buying players, and they acknowledge all the issues: ad fraud, brand safety, inflated tech costs, and more. But view this as a challenge, with winning defined as those who can use the current system to outperform their competition—or outrun the lion, if you wish.

If marketers are losing half their open programmatic investment to ad fraud, they use techniques like Fou Analytics to reduce that to less than 10% to put themselves in front. They manage DSP fees and measure performance to optimise their media investment. They tighten definitions of safe and unsafe trading environments and build closer working relationships with all parts of the adtech chain.

They constantly optimise their media investment, understanding that change is the only certainty and that it provides opportunities. Rather than trying to hold back the tide, they pull out the longboard and surf the waves of change to the beach.

But which one to choose? Like most dilemmas, the answer is both. Yes, advertisers and their agencies, particularly the large holding companies, need to help the government shape the media trading environment. But in the meantime, it is incumbent on every advertiser to have their media team outrun the lion and surf the waves of opportunity to totally mix a metaphor.