Havas offers tool to track programmatic spending across vendors

Dive Brief:

Advertising agency holding company Havas Group is launching its Client Trading Solution portal, a platform that will allow clients to track their exact spending with different digital vendors along with real-time metrics on ad performance, per The Wall Street Journal.
One purpose of the new platform is to engender more trust in programmatic advertising.
The platform includes demand-side platforms, ad exchanges and agency trading desks and gives marketers access to pricing negotiations Havas’s traders have with vendors, itemized tech and agency fees charged and compare performance between vendors.

Dive Insight:

Accurate measurement has always been an issue for digital marketers, and this year measurement has become a major topic of industry discussion beginning in January with P&G’s Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard demanding its digital ad vendors provide MRC-accredited third-party measurement or lose the CPG giant’s substantial online ad business. Along with accurate measurement, the industry has also clamored for transparency — so much so that the Association of National Advertisers named the word “transparency” the marketing word of the year last year.

Havas’s new client platform looks to address both issues by providing a more complete view into the often murky programmatic process that occurs between an advertiser bidding on inventory and their ad actually appearing on a publisher website as well as giving clients a real-time tool to track ad performance.

Programmatic in particular has been under fire. The ANA released a report that outlined how marketers aren’t understanding and adjusting to a programmatic media buying supply chain. There have been public concerns on both sides of that supply chain with The Guardian suing the ad tech firm Rubicon Project over improperly disclosed buyer fees and Chase scaling back the number of websites programmatically serving its ads from 400,000 to 5,000 with no notable change in the cost of impressions or viewability of those ads.

If Havas can provide its clients meaningful viewability into the programmatic process, that’s a capability that should get the attention of the overall digital ad industry.