• by Tobi Elkin , Staff Writer @tobielkin, February 11, 2016

Programmatic technologies seem to invite greater distrust and fraud into the advertising ecosystem, according to Kevin Rettig, senior manager, personalization & customer analytics, Accenture. So Rettig says the industry needs to take a collective “wait a minute” on programmatic.

That was his message at a recent presentation, “How Programmatic Advertising Pulled The Trigger On (Dis)Trust," part of MediaPost’s event, “The Reckoning: Trust, Transparency, Science & Accountability.” 

Rettig cited several key “wait a minute” issues:

1. Agency rebates and kickbacks. “From our perspective, it’s a big topic," he said. What’s the loss of value along the way? “Forty to sixty cents of every dollar is wasted and only a quarter of the ad spend is going to what you thought you were spending,” Rettig noted, according to his research.

2. Agency holding companies are investing in ad tech -- but “wait a minute, what do these investments mean for clients?” Rettig maintained that agencies haven’t been straight with their clients.

3. Agencies are walking away from trading desk models. Rettig noted that Xaxis says it’s not a trading desk but just another opportunity on the media plan.

4. And finally, tech companies are having trouble getting profitable. Rettig cited Rocket Fuel specifically, but alluded to other players.

Still, programmatic continues to grow. There’s low confidence but spending is growing. Marketers are cynical about their agencies. Obfuscation and confusion abound.

So what should marketers do? Rettig said AB InBev handled the bulk of its media buying and planning in-house until it chose Mediacom. Handling programmatic in-house has varying degrees of success.

The benefits of handling programmatic in-house are greater transparency, control and agility. When marketers outsource, they don’t gain any learning. On the flip side, they might not have the internal talent to do it -- or the time.

“If we’re talking about true personalization using enabling technologies, all of these things are part of the consumer journey. You need to use data for all these things and not just paid media. It’s not just about how to use my data to get a cheaper ad. There are many more use cases for collecting data than just serving ads,” Rettig explained. In fact, enabling personalized marketing via data is a holy grail, he noted.

Editor's note: These remarks were published in an earlier edition of RTBlog, but we think they bear repeating.