If you’ve ever tried explaining programmatic advertising to your parents, then you know the industry is about as foggy as pea soup and as murky as the Dagobah system. There are publishers with audiences, and there are brands trying to reach those audiences—in between sits the tangled web of servers, exchanges, and vendors that make up programmatic advertising.

Industry orgs have consistently raised concerns about this lack of transparency, with one recent study finding that 15% of advertiser spend in the programmatic supply chain is “unattributable.” And according to new research published by the advertising research and consulting company Adalytics, fees collected by intermediaries in the programmatic supply chain (DSPs and SSPs) can vary widely. Like, very widely.

Some examples from the research:

• A “significant” amount of spend is going to vendors, not publishers. For a $10 ad bid, Adalytics found that, on average, up to 35% goes to the DSP and SSP.
• In some instances, ad-tech companies received up to 98% (!) of an ad buyer’s bid, while the publisher—you know, the one that made the content and has the audience—only received about 2%.
• Take rates, aka fees, vary wildly depending on the publisher. Some SSPs were charging lower fees for “made-for-advertising” sites, aka clickbait, compared to publishers with “niche but high-value audiences”...or what you might consider real newsrooms.

More numbers: For every fourth ad impression, at least 46% of ad spend goes to either a DSP or SSP, or sometimes both. On average, for half of all ad impressions, the “cumulative middlemen fee” going to vendors ranged from 22% to 45%, the report states.

But it gets weird. In some instances, a publisher received more payment for an ad impression than the cost of the actual bid; for example, a buyer could bid $9 for an impression, but a publisher would get paid $10.17. Why? Most likely because an SSP is subsidizing a bid to improve its win rate, theorizes Krzysztof Franaszek, founder of Adalytics.

Check your work

The report, which analyzed data collected via Adalytics’s own browser extension as well as proprietary data shared by advertisers and publishers with Adalytics, points out that publishers might be getting the raw end of the deal.

In fact, the opacity of the industry makes it difficult for publishers to even check whether their own contracts with third-parties are actually being upheld, Franaszek told Marketing Brew.

“If advertisers want to make sure their media buys are optimized, and if publishers want to make sure they are getting paid what they expect for their media inventory, they need to request, store, and analyze log files regularly,” Franaszek told Marketing Brew.

Read the full story here.—RB

At first glance, the latest road-safety video for Waka Kotahi, New Zealand’s transportation agency, might not seem like an ad. It almost looks like a trailer for an indie thriller—think reversed images, aerial shots of the countryside, and haunting string music.

The mood is fitting for its subject matter—last year, 319 people died on New Zealand roads. Leisa Wall, executive creative director at FCB New Zealand, said the agency wanted to break New Zealand’s PSA norms of the last 10 or 15 years, which focused more on personal fault, and instead show the human impact of the problem.

We spoke with Wall about the artistic choices behind the ad, how Covid disrupted their shoot, and New Zealand’s hope to eliminate road deaths entirely by 2050.

The real toll: In Australia and New Zealand, the term “road toll” is used to describe the number of deaths caused by accidents on the road. That’s what inspired the concept for the ad, in which an actual tollbooth operator asks the father driving the car to pay with his daughter’s life. “We needed to put a stake in the ground and just say, enough’s enough, you know, this number that we’re so used to hearing on the news and over long weekends is actually human lives,” Wall said.

Deserted, not on the island: The direction and artistic vision for the ad came from director Steve Ayson, who has worked with companies like Nike and Spotify. At one point during the shoot, New Zealand’s Covid restrictions prevented Ayson from re-entering the country while in LA, so the team had to scramble to figure out a solution. Wall said Ayson “basically traveled around the show on this little iPad on a stick,” which they called the “Steve-sickle.” On the plus side, she said that being a floating head allowed him to fit into small spaces and work in between shots rather than get caught up in the day-to-day of the shoot.

Read more about the campaign here.—KH

To remind people how creepy data collection and ad targeting can be, Apple CEO Tim Cook described what very well could have been an Apple ad.

“Imagine a stranger following you as you take your child to school, holding a camera outside the driver’s-side window, recording everything you do. Imagine you open your computer and the stranger is suddenly watching your every keystroke,” he said, delivering a keynote address at the International Association of Privacy Professionals’ Global Privacy Summit on Tuesday. “You wouldn’t call that a service, you would call it an emergency,” he said, basically describing the, um, advertising industry.

Zoom out: Last year, Apple rolled out privacy protections for users that let them stop apps from tracking them across the web. The changes have put a beating on Meta’s advertising business. Google is also walking its own privacy-related road to Damascus. Because of Meta, Apple, and Google’s size, these changes have fundamentally altered digital advertising.

• But, but, but: Some say Apple isn’t exactly the privacy champion it claims to be.

What grabbed headlines: After calling for stricter US privacy laws, Cook called out what’s known as “sideloading,” the practice of downloading an app that circumvents Apple’s App Store. Though European regulators might force Apple to allow it, Cook said that if allowed, “data-hungry companies would be able to avoid our privacy rules and once again track our users against their will.”

“We hope all of you in the privacy community will join our efforts to make sure that regulations are crafted, interpreted, and implemented in a manner that protects people’s fundamental rights,” Cook told attendees. “The impact that technology makes on society is not predetermined. The loss of privacy is not inevitable.”—RB

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Hot off the press: 20 stats about the wild world of public relations.

Learn: Meta has debuted a video series about its safety and reporting tools.

$$$: Snap invested $150,000 in eight start-ups as part of its Yellow accelerator program. Read about them here.

Your brand, our voice. We take pride in what we put out into the world, and that includes crafting custom branded content for our beloved partners. Tell your brand’s story in new and exciting ways with the Morning Brew Creative Studio.

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Stat: TikTok could triple its ad revenue to more than $11 billion in 2022, according to Insider Intelligence data reported by Reuters. That would be more than Twitter and Snap’s combined ad sales.

Another stat: Nearly half of new HBO Max subscribers are choosing the ad-supported tier, WarnerMedia’s Jason Kilar told Bloomberg.

Watch: Last Week Tonight’s takedown of data brokers. Even if you think you know everything about digital advertising, it’s a must-watch.

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