WPP's GroupM seeks to make advertising work better for everyone — marketers, consumers and media — with a media-buying framework it calls "Responsible Investment." The effort aims to advance brand safety, data ethics, responsible journalism, sustainability and diversity, equity and inclusion.
Improving the media ecosystem requires tackling ad fraud and improving measurement methods to help understand consumer engagement with media, Adam Gerber, global chief investment officer at Essence, a unit of WPP’s GroupM, said in this interview with Beet.TV.
Weeding out fake ad inventory is a necessary step in tackling ad fraud, especially as programmatic buying continues to grow.
"The platforms that are connecting those sellers into our environments have a direct path to understanding who the real suppliers are and who aren't," Gerber said.
"They're ultimately cutting checks to those sellers, and should be able to vet them in a more proactive way." Improving the media supply chain also requires a better understanding of whether consumers are actually seeing ads, especially as they spend more time with connected devices like smart TVs and mobile phones.
"The big question there is whether the screen that's being consumed — that that content is being cast to or delivered to — is actually tuned into that viewing source," Gerber said.
"There's potentially a lot of viewing or ad delivery that's being captured that isn't real.
We need to make sure we have measurement solutions in place that truly identify whether that's happening and to what extent." Advertisers and their agencies are in the early stages of developing ways to better measure viewability and engagement.
"The general premise of viewability needs to be something that we continue to focus on, and evolve," Gerber said.
"It has a lot more to do with understanding the level of engagement and attention that a viewer has with content." The Global Forum will be streamed on the GroupM LinkedIn feed from 1 to 5 pm EDT on 6/23.
The program is made possible with the support of IBM Watson Advertising, MediaMath, Nielsen and PubMatic.
To stay informed of the Forum details and agenda use the hashtag #ResponsibleMedia and visit beet.tv/media-future.