• by Joe Mandese , Yesterday

Three years after the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) first began benchmarking "programmatic transparency" via an ongoing series of ad industry reports, the IAB Tech Lab this morning announced the launch of a new "industry council" to address "transparency in the $200 billion U.S. programmatic ad market."

The timing of the IAB Tech Lab initiative is interesting, given that the ANA is in the process of transitioning to a new generation of leaders, including the impending retirement of Group Executive Vice President Bill Duggan, who has led much of the ANA's programmatic transparency initiatives.

Beyond that, it is difficult for me to understand the reason the IAB Tech Lab is entering the fray now, but the composition and orientation of its new "Programmatic Governance Council" looks telling.

Initial participants include leadership from agencies, publishers, and platforms -- including execs from Dentsu, Omnicom Media Group, WPP, Disney, Magnite, PubMatic, Hearst, News Corp, Yahoo, Amazon Ads, The Trade Desk, Raptive, and Mediavine -- but no advertisers explicitly.

Which raises an important question for the new council's mandate: transparent for whom?

To be fair, the IAB Tech Lab and the ANA have long had a collaborative relationship working on many important industry initiatives, but given how much the ANA has paved the way for ad industry transparency about the programmatic advertising marketplace, you'd think it would be an explicit part of this one.

"The scale of programmatic means agencies are responsible for navigating a massive supply chain on behalf of advertisers," Omnicom Chief Media Officer Ben Hovaness said in a statement, offering a buy-side perspective in the IAB Tech Lab announcement and adding: "Our clients expect clarity about where their money goes and how media is actually traded. Sitting down with publishers and platforms to work through these issues together is how you move from talking about transparency to actually creating it."

I'm not saying they are coming a little late to the game, but given the light the ANA has already shone on the programmatic marketplace, I have to ask how transparent the IAB Tech Lab's agenda actually is.

We'll find out over the "next 5-12 months," according to the IAB Tech Lab's announcement, because that will be the window in which it says it will begin providing "clearer guidance on auction transparency, more consistent handling of transaction signals, and stronger alignment between buyers, sellers, and platforms on what trustworthy programmatic execution should look like. This will help buyers direct spend to supply chain partners, providing clear value."

In the meantime, I'm assuming the ANA will continue doing so to help the clients of media buyers, as well as their supply chain.