ANA's new consortium works to rebuild trust between brands and agencies

Dive Brief:

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) announced the ANA Trust Consortium, a new initiative that will help its members handle trust and transparency in the digital supply chain, according to a news release shared with Marketing Dive.
The ANA Trust Consortium will serve as a voice for brands on transparency, measurement, auditing, digital fraud and brand safety through ongoing reporting and analysis. The group will create white papers covering best practices and important issues, as well as industry standards for marketers, agencies and suppliers. It will cover demand-side and supply-side platforms, including media buying agencies, trading decks and publishers.
The consortium’s founding members include law firm and ANA general counsel Reed Smith, Firm Decisions, KPMG, Ebiquity, ID Comms, PJL Media, Reset Digital, PRGX Global, Simulmedia, MediaLink, Ron Pullem and Cortex Media. Reed Smith will hold a leadership role in its overall operations.

Dive Insight:

As issues like in-housing, transparency and brand safety continue to impact the marketing industry, the ANA —which represents some of the largest marketers in the world — is making it a priority to help improve the health of brand-agency relationships via its new consortium.

The initiative was inspired by a new ANA study cited in the news release revealing that just 29% of client-side marketers ranked trust with ad agencies as "high," with 55% calling the trust "moderate" and 17% said trust was low. And, 28% think trust has declined compared to a couple of years ago. Enhanced transparency contributed to high trust while transparency concerns contributed to moderate and low trust. Clients taking work traditionally handled by agencies in-house was also listed as contributing to distrust.

Seventy-eight percent of marketers worked with some type of in-house agency in 2018, compared to 58% in 2013 and 42% in 2008, according to separate ANA research. Forty-four percent of marketers have set up an in-house shop in the past five years, and in-house agencies are handling more significant marketing duties, like strategy, creative, media planning and buying, and programmatic.

The consortium follows other initiatives that ANA has been involved with aimed at improving trust and transparency. The group was involved in the creation of a new industry standard Data Transparency Label designed to look like a "nutritional label." It discloses source, collection, segmentation criteria, recency and cleansing supplies for audience segment data.