The CEOs of three major advertising industry associations shared a stage on the second day of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s MIXX Conference, using the occasion to announce a new accountability organization to tackle ad fraud, piracy and malware.
The jointly managed group will have its own board and leadership, and it will be tasked with establishing industry principles and holding companies accountable to them. The goal, according to the IAB’s Randall Rothenberg, is to “weed out ad fraud from the digital supply chain.”
Bob Liodice of the Association of National Advertisers, Nancy Hill of the American Association of Advertising Agencies and Rothenberg also discussed what has been an eight-year partnership among the organizations spanning initiatives. Despite having different agendas and not always seeing eye-to-eye, each emphasized that collaboration is necessary in order to achieve progress on issues ranging from policy to industry standards.
“We woke up and realized we can’t do it alone. If we act in silos, we will only be interested in our own agendas,” Liodice said.
Collaboration has proven fruitful for the groups. Recently, they have introduced a set of standards on ad viewability to tackle the problem of advertisers paying for digital ads that are not being seen by anyone. The 3MS initiative has had a rocky start and faced some criticism for defining viewability too stringently. The leaders said that feedback is simply part of the process of establishing industry-wide standards.
“The situation we were faced with was completely unacceptable. It won’t be fixed tomorrow, but we have to keep going down that road,” Hill said, adding, “Tell us what you think is reasonable, and let’s work towards that standard.”
Privacy policy in particular has been an area of achievement for the groups. They created the Digital Advertising Alliance, which Liodice said is the main reason “European-style” privacy regulations do not exist in the U.S., where privacy and data issues are largely self-regulated.
“There hasn’t been a more important revolution than what the DAA is doing for the industry,” Liodice said.
Hill agreed, emphasizing that the work is far from finished.
“It is really incumbent upon us to make sure the message gets out there about the good,” she said. “We really have a long way to go about awareness.”
SmartBrief’s Ambreen Ali is providing special coverage of the IAB MIXX Conference and will post live updates @SBoSM.
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