Trust between Marketers and the Digital Supply Chain in a Post-Corona World

The Internationalist talks with two industry leaders in two quite different roles who are both passionate about encouraging transparency in advertising.  Doug Wood of Reed Smith believes that if brands abandon efforts to bring transparency to the digital media process, brands will cause grievous harm to their shareholders. Manuel Reyes, with his company Cortex Media, is working to encourage …

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The Internationalist talks with two industry leaders in two quite different roles who are both passionate about encouraging transparency in advertising.  Doug Wood of Reed Smith believes that if brands abandon efforts to bring transparency to the digital media process, brands will cause grievous harm to their shareholders. Manuel Reyes, with his company Cortex Media, is working to encourage transparency among their marketer clients.  However, he is also finding that transparency is possible only if marketers care.  Often, to his great disappointment, short-term pricing gains matter more than long term principles.

Today’s conversation looks at ideas moving forward as both men discuss how issues around trust and transparency can become a greater priority to marketers.

Speakers:

Moderator:  Deborah Malone of The Internationalist 

Douglas Wood is a partner at Reed Smith, where he leads the firm’s Advertising and Marketing Law team.  He is the champion of the ANA Trust Consortium, an alliance among industry members that acts as a voice for the ecosystem on transparency, measurement, auditing, digital fraud, and brand safety through ongoing reporting and analysis.   Doug led the advertising industry’s legal team in the transformative media transparency investigation in 2016 and establishment of the industry standard contract template. 

Manuel Reyes is a member of the ANA Trust Consortium. He is also the founder of Cortex Media and has been providing media auditing and consulting services to top-tier advertisers in North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia since 2001. The company is recognized globally as a resource for balanced and independent viewpoints on key advertising media topics in US and worldwide.

Issues Covered:

An update on where the marketing industry is today in understanding the complexity of transparency issues.

Are we now living in a “Post Transparency” World?  Is this semantics or reflective of marketer attitudes? 

Do people with varying roles in the marketing organization have different views regarding issues of transparency?

Will perspectives on transparency change as there are greater financial concerns ahead– both at the advertiser level and the agency level?

Doug Wood: In January, you offered a top 10 List of legal issues of concern to the marketing industry.  Have any of the items on that list changed in priority?

Manuel Reyes: You have just completed a major proprietary study for your clients on the Current US Media Market Outlook, which includes a discussion of media cancellations, Upfront concerns and a Media Inflation Outlook– for which Cortex is well-known.  Can you share some insights with us from that work?  And tell us what that means for Transparency?

What needs to be done to make these matters of trust and transparency a greater priority for marketers?