Almost a year ago I wrote a piece called The Ad Industry Is The Web's Lapdog. In it I said...
"One of the important responsibilities of the advertising industry is to be an 'honest broker' between our clients and the media. We have failed miserably...The ad industry has become the web's lapdog...becoming a de facto sales arm for the online ad industry. Self-interest has come into conflict with responsibility. Guess what's winning?"A few weeks before that I wrote...
"They (the agencies) buy online ad space at one price and then sell it to their clients at another price...As far as I can tell, this is clearly a conflict of interest. But somehow the agencies have convinced some dumbass clients that this is perfectly okay."Well, in a huge surprise to absolutely no one with a functioning brain, The Wall Street Journal reported last week that agency media buying practices are corrupt...
"Ad agencies are facing growing scrutiny regarding the transparency of their practices and their compensation. Marketers say they’re increasingly worried agencies are allocating ad dollars in ways that best suit their own businesses, as opposed to those of their clients."Golly gee. I am just gobsmacked.
The Journal article pays particular attention to rebates and other forms of kickbacks -- oops, sorry, I mean "arrangements" -- but former Mediacom (part of WPP) CEO Jon Mandel says...
“There are many different facets of this...it’s not every agency, but each agency that does it does it differently.”While I believe there's hanky-panky going on across the media industry, I suspect it's worst in digital. The bullshit machine that is the online ad industry and their cozy pals in the global agency business -- enabled by astoundingly clueless CMOs -- have been having a big ol' fiesta at the expense of dumbshit marketers who have no idea what they're buying or what they're paying.
As I wrote almost 2 years ago...
"The display ad industry is crooked. Agencies are greedy. Clients are clueless. Watching these clowns is the best show in town."Just for the record, here is some stuff I've written about this suddenly hot topic in the past few years. The same information was available to anyone who cared enough to seek it out.
December 8, 2014
"I spent over forty years in the advertising business, and in that time I never saw anything like the corruption and double-dealing that is currently being perpetrated..."January 14, 2015
"This type and level of corruption has never existed before in the ad business."October 15, 2014
"This will never change as long as brain-dead advertisers keep feeding the fraud machine."April 29, 2013
"When you take a gullible industry that has acted in an irresponsible and foolhardy manner to sell snake oil to its clients, add to that some very sophisticated crooks who are way ahead of the naive buyers and sellers of ads, and top it off with indecipherable metrics that are intentionally designed to confuse and mislead, you have yourself a very toxic blend."September 23, 2013
"There is clearly a substantial amount of criminal and deceitful activity going on."
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