One step forward, two steps back… towards common digital viewability standard

Is recent P&G statement about adopting MRC standard leads into wrong direction or is it indeed a first step in the chain of events that could reshape global media landscape?

 

Recently there was a lot of buzz in social media regarding P&G Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard‘s speech with strong messages to digital media. Marketing Week’s columnist Mark Ritson devoted a separate article to that, calling it “P&G biggest marketing speech for 20 years”.  I’m a big fan of Mark (Ritson, not Pritchard) as I think that despite him being seemingly critical about digital, he understands the value of it much better than many other “digitally-enthusiastic” marketers. So naturally, I was curious to have a look at the details of why this could potentially be something groundbreaking for the industry.

First of all, why P&G is unhappy? Well, for one, these days to justify payments for on-line media advertisers in many cases have to rely on suppliers’ internal metrics. While it doesn’t sound awful, it actually is a big thing. There are fearsome three letters, which finance department frequently use to frighten marketers: SOX. This stands for Sarbanes–Oxley Act passed by US Senate and obligatory for all US companies. It was written after Enron scandal and while of course it doesn’t have a direct relation to digital, this act made an enormous change in internal controls and created numerous internal procedures to make sure all accounting practices in modern corporations are whiter than white.

On advertising side in P&G there is a huge, powerful procurement department responsible for negotiations with suppliers. A company needs to pass through seven rounds of hell to qualify and has to provide tons of paperwork then to justify every service delivered. Now in this sterile world of lab robes and white gloves there is company, calling itself, for example, Facebook, that charges you hundreds of millions and says something like “trust us, this is your cost per click, we measured it ourselves! “