Bill Duggan penned a piece in MediaVillage.com last week continuing the ANA’s attack on ad agencies — this time over production transparency, which is the code name for unethical and possibly illegal bid-rigging activities conducted by some agencies to secure production contracts at favorable rates. A previous transparency issue, media transparency, was investigated by ANA in 2016, and it confirmed instances of media agencies enriching themselves at client expense through rebates, kickbacks and other “non-transparent” practices, many of them not forbidden by existing contracts. Duggan summarized ANA’s view about these two transparency issues: “The advertising industry continues to suffer from a transparency crisis, which has broken down trust between advertisers and agencies … the ad agency community now needs to acknowledge and address these issues rather than continuing to issue denials …” By Michael Farmer