• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, October 3, 2024

Caveat emptor: buyer beware. Tread carefully. Trust but verify.

Sometimes, you need to deal with people or institutions that are presumptuously out to get you, so we have sayings like the ones above to remind ourselves to exercise great care lest we get hurt. It made sense in dealing with Roman markets with traveling merchants. It makes sense when you’re walking on an icy sidewalk. It makes sense when you’re negotiating nuclear weapons agreements with a sworn enemy.

Doesn’t it seem crazy, I ask you, that we have to operate the same way when transacting digital advertising among the handful of major sellers, buyers and enablers of programmatic digital advertising?

It’s not an accident that we are now seeing things like “Who cares?” This is a movement of ad industry leaders fed up with the garbage being delivered to consumers today in the name of advertising, the obsessive focus on tactics over strategy, the growing fraud in transactions and the pervasiveness of self-dealing practices that are now more the norm in our industry than the exception.

We have companies defining our industry that were built into powerhouses under operating doctrine like “Don’t be evil.” Sounds to me like that leaves clearance for a very wide range of not good conduct, including “being not so good,” “being outright bad,” and “being anything short of pure evil.”

It’s no wonder we have a trust problem in our industry today. Most transactions are run through black boxes, which creates an inherent nervousness.

How can this be solved? “Strategic partnership” is the watchword for that. As long as the beneficiaries of the transactions share some of their margin with those who enable them, no one digs too deep and is happy to move on.

It might not be the right thing. It might not be the good thing to do for the client. But it’s not evil if you yourself didn’t do anything wrong, or don’t even know (or want to know) what's happening inside the Black Box.

We know the saying, in its many representations: Hear no evil. See no evil. Speak no evil.

Why can’t the digital ad industry learn to celebrate doing the right thing, like it does doing the hard thing?

We pride ourselves on doing hard things. As venture capitalist Ben Horowitz wrote in his book, “The Hard Thing about Hard Things”: “Hard things are hard because there are no easy answers or recipes. They are hard because your emotions are at odds with your logic. They are hard because you don't know the answer and you cannot ask for help without showing weakness.”

That’s not the issue when it comes to doing the right thing. We have lots of easy answers and recipes. We were taught them all of our lives by our parents, teachers, fables, books, safety officers. We have millennia of readings on them — peruse the good books of any major religion. We have simple versions written in commandments.

If our industry is good at doing hard things, why can’t everyone do right things? Maybe too many feel too much pressure to just make their numbers? Maybe we have too many fence-sitters on those kinds of issues, happy to follow the not-so-good examples of others, if “everyone’s doing it” in their minds?

What our industry does matters in the world. We have upended (“destroyed” might be a better word) independent journalism, particularly at the local level. We have let social media elevate visibility of opinion over facts. We enable foreign actors to undermine sovereign nations through weaponized misinformation and disinformation.

I am writing this column from a cafe in Kyiv, Ukraine. I can see firsthand how digital information weapons work hand-in-hand with kinetic weapons.

Early in my career, I worked as a lawyer on behalf of newspaper companies and spent a lot of time protecting the freedom of the press. I know that free press companies need robust advertising business to function.

I hope that our industry can learn to celebrate doing “the right thing” as much as we celebrate doing “the hard thing.” The free world is depending on us.