Marc Pritchard, the marketer with the keys to Procter & Gamble’s $8 billion ad budget in the U.S., is calling for more transparency from digital platforms. You know what that means — it’s that special time of year when marketers dust off their soapboxes and preach about the virtues of honesty and clarity in advertising.
No sooner had Pritchard, P&G’s chief brand officer, dropped those remarks at the Association of National Advertisers’ Media Conference last week, than marketers, figuratively speaking, joined hands in a show of solidarity.
A quick glance at the social buzz surrounding Pritchard’s words reveals just how much they stirred the pot. There were enthusiastic nods of agreement punctuated by exclamation marks, messages laden with supportive emojis, and even the occasional #ROAS thrown in for good measure.
Once again, the world’s most high-profile marketer had thrust transparency back into the spotlight, making it the talk of the marketing town.
But let’s be real — usually, it’s all talk and no walk, isn’t it?
Sure, there are baby steps — an audit here, a consulting firm hire there — but rarely do they result in marketers taking tangible steps toward transparency.
Just look at the so-called debate over made-for-arbitrage sites for proof.
Yet, upon closer inspection, there are indeed glimmers of real change. It may not be much, admittedly, but it’s a start — one that’s long overdue.
And nowhere is this clearer than in how marketers are demanding more clarity on what happens to their hard-earned cash once it’s poured into Google’s ad machine following a string of recent snafus. They’ve talked about it countless times before, but now they’re actually making moves — and they’ve got the battle scars to prove it: agency changes, ad tech upheaval and in-housing, to name a few.
In fact, one particular marketer has gone above and beyond by hiring an independent consultant to work alongside its agency in this transparency drive.
They’ve asked the agency to secure as much data on their advertising in Google’s ecosystem as possible so the consultant can analyze it. That says a lot about the agency’s capabilities — or lack thereof — as well as the sheer complexity of the task at hand, which in itself is a microcosm for one of the underlying dynamics at the root of the transparency issue.
“We’ve been wrangling with our agency to get that data from Google but the problem is we’re not able to access it fast,” said the marketer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to Digiday.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Once they’ve got their hands on the data, they’ve got to analyze it, package it up and present it in a way that makes sense to the senior executives in the boardroom. Because, let’s be clear, this isn’t just about showing them how much money is being flushed down the drain — it’s about making that money work smarter, not harder.
Well, maybe to a certain extent.
Marketers — not this one, to be fair — are sounding off about transparency and putting the hard yards in to get some clarity on what they actually buy from Google’s sprawling marketplace, all while funneling more of those dollars into non-transparent, performance-focused, generative AI-based ad products from the same company.
It’s a paradox worth pondering. Some marketers certainly have done this, and they’ve concluded that even taking one step forward and two steps back can lead to progress by providing valuable lessons, fostering resilience and prompting necessary adjustments for more effective advancement. Better to do something, even if it’s imperfect, than nothing at all.
After all, marketers are publicly judged on social good but are privately rewarded financially. Reconciling these two sides is like trying to untangle a knot in a string: Progress is made, but there’s always a point where the threads resist further unraveling.
From Digiday’s talks with marketers over the past year or so, these efforts focus