principal-based buying

Open AI finally gets ads; YouTube gets its own BBC shows; and marketers get to grading their own homework.

Principal-based buying isn’t inherently bad. When incentives are aligned, clients get more precision and speed than traditional agency models often allow. The issue isn’t the mechanism; it’s the incentives.

Transparency has become the currency of credibility in advertising. Larger holding companies and black box AI platforms must recognize that their opaque practices are no longer sustainable.

Erez Levin, a former Googler and current outspoken consultant, on why the digital ad industry should transact on media quality signals like attention instead of optimizing to outcomes and other flawed attribution models.

Where principal media has gone wrong is that buyers have commoditized it due to an overreliance on vanity metrics in contractual agreements.

What do toasters have in common with transparency and online advertising standards? Quite a lot, actually, says Ben Hovaness, chief media officer at OMD Worldwide. No, really.

Tune into the first episode of the year with guest Andrew Frank, VP and distinguished analyst at research firm Gartner. We cover a lot of ground, from the impact of multiple major Big Tech antitrust trials to practical AI use cases (minus the BS).

Publishers expect the agencies will eliminate tech redundancies as they consolidate, which could compel pubs to shed redundant tech themselves. The merger could also entrench principal-based buying, which may not be a bad thing.

Jared Belsky, CEO and co-founder of indie digital agency Acadia, needs your help. He’d like someone to please explain to him why media arbitrage isn’t a form of stealing.

IPG buying Node continues the trend of agencies trying new business models; IPG and Publicis support principal-based buying while WPP opposes it; and billionaire owners believe controlling their newsrooms will win back public trust.

Former Dentsu CEO Wendy Clark, current president of consulting group Consello, sees the renewed controversy around principal-based buying as a symptom of a more fundamental issue: the lack of open dialogue between brands and their agencies.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. A Programmatic Standoff Agencies sing the praises of open marketplace bidding. But clients aren’t listening. Neither company stakeholders nor advertiser clients are fully convinced that bidding on the open marketplace is effective enough to justify all the expenses, Digiday reports. Transparency – rather, the […]

In today’s newsletter: The “user agent” concept is dead; principal-based buying is just arbitrage by another name; and a deep dive into BuzzFeed’s doomed acquisition of Complex.