Dive Brief:

• Mediasmith has joined Empower MediaMarketing in leaving the 4A's over its non-support of the Association of National Advertisers’ media buying transparency guidelines according to reporting by MediaPost.
• Mediasmith founder and CEO David Smith said the decision to leave the organization wasn’t taken lightly, but the agency wasn’t willing to sign on to 4A's transparency guidelines after its less than enthusiastic response to the ANA’s guidelines.
• “The 4A's is fighting a battle that’s not our battle,” Smith told MediaPost. “It’s the battle of New York mega agency companies. Our battle is to distance ourselves from those in the industry that are doing arbitrage, doing kickbacks, and literally putting it in writing to the tech companies on when and where to send the money.”

Dive Insight:

Transparency is a major issue in digital advertising given the volume of ad space bought programmatically, as well as the amount of click fraud and maladvertising. For marketers it’s frustrating to see industry organizations at odds over such basic matters. The ANA issued a report this summer that found rampant rebates between agencies and publishers to the detriment of marketers buying ad space, a report that put the transparency argument front and center.

Given the importance of the issue, it would be better to see the 4A's and ANA work together rather than have public dust ups with member agencies leaving over procedural moves requiring signing on to a certain set of guidelines. Instead, 4A's recently upgraded its own guidelines around transparency to make them standards enforced by a threat of expulsion for violators. 

“It is our strong belief that transparency is a core principle and the cornerstone of the agency and client relationship,” 4A's President and CEO Nancy Hill, who is scheduled to step down next year, wrote in a blog post on the transparency topic. “The TGPC is based upon a belief that sound and ethical practice is good business. Trust and respect is indispensable to success in our business where relationships must be based on good faith.”