Holding advertisers accountable.

I get pretty fed up with some of the pithy idioms that people throw around. One of these is “at the end of the day.” Perhaps it annoys me because it is so in vogue among the MBA crowd, who need to regard the bottom line first (simple) while sounding sage (difficult). Whatever the case, I’m going to use it in conjunction with another idiom in a second, so bear with me.

At the end of the day, when it comes to accountability in advertising, those concerned with the direction of our industry need only “follow the money.”

Hal Holbrook’s Deep Throat in “All the Presidents’ Men” had it right. When you want to know who is behind any intriguing commercial dynamic, all you need to do is follow the money.

When adware, shady affiliate networks, and pure arbitrage and performance networks started to grow as quickly as they did a few years ago, it was because so many Fortune 100 companies were pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into them to drive customer acquisition and further amortize the investments that some of them had made in enormous Web assets.

Conversely, when news began to reflect that these companies were on the wane, it was in no small part due to the fact that so many industry advocates, thought leaders and others were calling for transparency in our business. I mentioned in this space last June that one such advocate had sent a Cease and Desist letter to 200 publicly traded companies, threatening to “out” them in a full-page ad in CMO magazine if they didn’t vow to pull the plug on their shady campaigns. He didn’t have to buy the ad. The letter did the trick.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this increased transparency in the wake of the recent actions taken by New York’s Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer, as well as by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission against service providers in our industry. It seems that there has developed a trend of late, wherein we hear about some kind of action being taken by enforcement against a service provider, who settles the claim. But, for a change, the other shoe then drops, and there is a subsequent action taken against the company that was paying the service provider.

As anyone who has followed regulation of our industry since the 1990s would attest, this is a recent change in what has long been a trend. Characteristically, direct marketing agencies have turned a blind eye to the means with which their vendors deliver results for their clients. Have you ever heard the term “blind network”? Well, until this new era of accountability began some time last year, ALL networks were blind. The term “blind network” is used derogatorily by the few networks that enable advertisers to select the sites their brands run on. This has not been the case for very long.

What drove this trend? Today, the difference is that advertisers understand that some affiliates and networks use means that may not be so acceptable. Therefore, there is a newfound vigilance by advertisers and their agencies as to where their brands will appear–and how they get there. This can only be good for our industry if we’re to grow to the levels some are predicting. It’s one thing for us to police ourselves. It’s wholly another thing for the money to flow only to vendors and tactics that merit it, not just from criteria based on ROI, but from a consumer viewpoint–and therefore, from a brand-protecting viewpoint.

As was reported on the front page of the Wall Street Journal April 10, it is anticipated that many more CPG companies will spend money online this year and next than ever before. Kraft, for one, expects to double its number of online campaigns in 2006. “Our job is to invest in where consumers are engaging with media,” said Pepsico’s vice president of sports, media, and interactive marketing, John Galloway, in the Journal piece. Consumers have made it abundantly clear that they do not like adware so much. Okay, they like it even less than that.

I use this next expression a lot, so perhaps it should be lumped into the same group of idioms as those in the beginning of this column: It’s the user, stupid. At the end of the day, advertisers get this, because advertisers know how to really follow the money.

Happily, networks, affiliates, performance marketing vendors, and others are catching on. We’ll all benefit along the way.

By Mark Naples
Courtesy of http://www.mediapost.com

Mark Naples is Managing Partner, WIT Strategy.