Three questions vendors don’t want you to ask.

“Practical and actionable.” Right. These are questions you, the advertisers, should ask of each of the vendors you are paying to buy programmatic media for you. These are questions the agencies, DSPs, exchanges, and verification vendors don’t want you to ask. So ask them.

Ask your agency

1. Ask for detailed placement reports, which show line item details of which sites and mobile apps your ads were shown on. Look for rows that say “n/a” or “not specified.” Consider why you are buying ads that went to “n/a” or domains or apps are “not specified.” Do humans visit sites called “not specified?” If the agency won’t give you these detailed reports, ask why? Review your contracts with the agency.
2. Ask for access to the dashboards so you can verify campaign settings and quantities. For example what numbers did the DSP (demand side platform) report compared to what the ad server reported. Those numbers should match up; after all for every bid you won and paid for, there should be an ad served. If these discrepancies are single-digit percentages you are good to go. But if 1/4 to 1/3 to 1/2 of the ads never got served, then you just paid for air. You didn’t get ads served. If the agency won’t give you access to dashboards, ask why? Review your contracts with the agency.
3. Ask for invoices and payments. Agencies are supposed to act as your agents. They are not supposed to mark-up the CPMs to make undisclosed margins without telling you. The invoices that they paid should match up with the ad budgets you allocated to them to be spent. If you gave them $10 million of digital ad budgets, and they only spent $6 million, ask what happened to the $4 million that was not spent. Money is not supposed to vanish like that. Remember the 15% “unknown delta” from the ISBA 2020 supply chain transparency report? P.S. the invoices are supposed to have the number of ad impressions purchased, and the CPMs, so you can verify what you paid for. If they don’t, the ask why?

Ask your DSP/exchange

1. Ask them to show how they are enforcing ads.txt. Every exchange claims they “use” ads.txt, the IAB protocol that is supposed to reduce domain spoofing. But “using” ads.txt is completely different from “enforcing” ads.txt. Ask them to show you proof they are actually enforcing ads.txt in your media buys. AppNexus/Xandr for example, has a checkbox that says “use ads.txt” and it is UNchecked by default. How many advertisers, or their media agencies, know about this check box and have checked it. In most cases that I have reviewed, ads.txt was available, but not enforced; so domain spoofing remains rampant AND breitbart continues to make money.
2. Ask them…

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