By Michael Bürgi | October 7, 2024
SUMMARY: For the second year in a row, Omnicom Media Group is leveraging the industry-wide forum that Advertising Week enables to shine a light on issues impacting media efficiency, kicking off the week with an update on the Ad Auction Standards Working Group that OMG is leading in partnership with the MRC, with support from ANA, 4As, WFA, and the IAB Tech Lab. Launched in May with a goal to standardize practices, policies, measurement, reporting and transparency in digital ad auctions – which currently account for more than $600 billion in global spend – the Auction Standards Working Group now has more than 70 participating companies including platforms, marketers, sellers, auctioneers, industry organizations, and four of the six agency holding companies. As the group prepares to send out a questionnaire to all 25 participating auction firms asking for info on their processes, steering committee lead Ben Hovaness, Global Chief Media Officer for OMG agency OMD, tells Digiday,
“The info gleaned from the questionnaires will guide how we write the ultimate standard that is going to define the industry expectation for how auctions are conducted — basically setting some guardrails around it. Because we do believe there’s room for a multiplicity of auction types, but there do need to be some guardrails around what practices are and are not permissible.”
Offering the client perspective, Katherine Freeley, the head of the Media Center of Excellence at Boehringer-Ingelheim said,
“The more visibility we have into the ad auction process, the more confident we can be in the integrity of digital ads marketplaces and the strength of our buying strategies – and that benefits all stakeholders.”
Adding the view from the auction firm side, Disney SVP of Addressable Sales Jamie Power said,
“From my early days on the buy side to now, I have consistently highlighted the importance of making dynamic media purchasing decisions that are optimized with real-time data, informed by immediate insights, and executed on the fly. We commend and support the efforts of the Working Group in sparking this vital discussion about enhanced insights and transparency in auction-based media.”