Jim Nail says, “Facebook’s admission that their video viewing numbers have been inflated for two years is one more shoe dropping in an ongoing breakdown of the relationships between advertisers, agencies and media companies in the advertising ecosystem. Coming after the ANA’s work on transparency, and the unresolved issue of fraud in the programmatic ecosystem, this points to a larger, more fundamental problem in the advertising industry.

I won’t try to diagnose them all (my colleague Sarah Sikowitz did a good job on the agency transparency issue on her blog). And I won’t even go into the fact that the agencies didn’t challenge these bogus counts.

But I have a word of advice for the digital industry: stop obsessing over bits and pixels and clicks (Oh My!). I’ve been in digital for 20 years and by now the industry should have learned that no matter how readily available this data is, it is meaningless relative to what advertisers really want to know: is my message getting through and having an impact? I may sound old fashioned, but in contrast to these irrelevant, spurious, and potentially inflated data, I’ll take a good-old exposed/unexposed ad communication/awareness/attribute association/purchase intent lift survey any day”.

The Trust Crisis in Advertising

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