Your "working media" isn't working. Are you prepared to ask the uncomfortable questions?

Between hidden mark-ups, programmatic malfeasance, "principal media buying" and ad fraud, trust me: you're getting ripped off. If you really want answers, I have your questions.

This is Part 2 of a 2-part media wake-up call to advertisers.

Last Week » How we got here.

This Week » What you can do about it

Look, it’s embarrassing to find out you’ve been ripped off. I’ve been there.

As a young, green and broke newlywed in Manhattan, newly moved from Honolulu, I got cleaned out in a 3-card monte game. It STILL makes me cringe.

I already told you in this post about it happening to me for the first time in advertising.

Even more embarrassing?

It happened to me again, ten years later, after I was supposed to be “Mr. Ad Fraud Expert” who knew better.

• My client hired a trusted friend to engineer an e-commerce campaign for one of our brands—the most we’d ever spent on a campaign like this

• The digital media spend was more than half the overall budget and the critical sales driver

• We “reached” our potential consumers and “got” a half-million clicks, right to our buy page, BUT NO SALES. ZERO. ZIP. NADA.

• That’s because ZERO HUMANS ACTUALLY SAW OUR ADS—only “bots”

• Online fraudsters stole our money, the brand lost its biggest retail customer, and it literally hurts to type this, much less share it

This type of ad fraud has been growing exponentially for over 20 years.

In 2025, half of the $300 Billion US digital advertising spend will be siphoned off by criminal operations, including state actors.

That is $150 Billion up in smoke, folks

This sound nuts…I know…it can’t be correct, right?

Sorry—it is.

As of 2024, the FBI and the DOJ specifically call out China, Russia, Iran and North Korea state actors, along with independent ad fraud crime rings all over the world.

But hey, here’s the “good” news! (not really…) » At least we have an answer to the apocryphal John Wanamaker quote from the late 1890’s:

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

RIGHT OFF THE TOP, before the additional stunts I’ll be outlining below, there goes half your digital money.

Where else is my working media not working?

Here’s another practice that’s moved from dirty dealing to accepted.

It’s called “principal media buying” » bulk media purchases by holding companies who then resell the inventory at secret mark-ups to clients.

Incredibly, instead of the industry putting a stop to it, it’s now embracing it.

This commentary last month in MediaPost by Maarten Albarda nails it:

Principal media buying, once a shadowy practice, is now well and truly center stage. The recent revelation that Meta is now offering this "service" to agencies is kind of like the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I am calling it. Principal buying, in its essence, is a betrayal. It moves the agency-client relationship from a trusted partnership into a minefield full of conflicts of interest. The agency, instead of being a fiduciary, becomes a vendor, pushing its own inventory, its own margins, its own agenda.

With principal buying, the media agency is no longer working for the client but for themselves. In effect, the agency is now competing with its own clients for the same media space. We all know high-quality media space is in short demand. If large agency holding companies start reserving big chunks of this media space to buy for themselves, there’s only one implication: Prices will go up for what is left on the market.

This is about transparency and trust. It's about the fundamental integrity of our industry. We're witnessing a systemic erosion of the principles that have long defined our profession.

In that respect, our industry is following in the footsteps of our country’s politics.

(Bold emphasis added by me.)

“Look the other way” industry groups and “watchdogs”

The 4As (the American Association of Advertising Agencies, and the APB, their “Advertiser Protection Bureau”), the ANA (the Association of National Advertisers), and the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) have been shameful lookaway cops on the ad media beat.

As I called out in this recent post, it took the ANA twenty years to begin flagging (but not truly addressing) ad fraud while still grossly underestimating the problem.

Let’s get to the questions every advertiser should be asking

To help you start protecting yourself, I’ve put together an alternative set of “4As” to help you start asking the right media questions, get to real answers, and take specific corrective actions:

• Addressability

• Accountability

• Attribution

• Accessibility:

1. Addressability

Can you prove that I’m actually addressing the audience I paid for? Can I audit my advertising in real time to confirm that? Did the ads even get published? If so, did humans see the ads, or did we just reach “bots”? Are hidden mark-ups siphoning off my “working media” spend? Should I even pay this bill?

Incredibly, many of these questions don’t even get asked, including the most obvious one of all: What portion of my digital or streaming TV media reaches actual human beings?

What’s the actual cost basis of the media I’m buying, and who’s taking a cut along the way—especially across holding company trade desks and programmatic (automated) platforms? Where’s all the transparency I’ve been promised?

And what about unchecked and still-growing ad fraud—what is my media agency doing to ensure I don’t get that 50% haircut right off the top?

As programmatic systems continue to scale up, addressability has become a black box bust, and a fraud-feast for shady global criminal operations. Why is this acceptable?

2. Accountability

Which parts of my media buy are truly working and persuading people to buy my stuff? Can you prove it? And who is truly accountable for my campaign outcomes? Wouldn’t “pay for performance” help incentivize transparency and better results across the increasingly corrupted “media value chain”?

“Last exposure attribution” has finally lost credibility (the theory that the last ad someone saw is the most important and persuasive.) That’s now officially BS. But what’s replacing it?

Marketers need to know what’s driving outcomes, and who’s accountable for the results. Instead, they get a stream of disjointed metrics, vanity KPIs (key performance indicators), finger-pointing around ever-larger foggy tables, and obfuscating post-campaign “reports.”

When “proofs of performance” are actually “proofs of perfidy”

I’ve seen this myself, live and in person. I helped fire a global media agency that foisted bogus results on my client in its bumbling “post campaign report.” Funny thing was, they were so inept that they accidentally revealed how they’d been lying to us.

My clients demanded a 50% refund on the campaign.

They laughed, we fired them, and they never missed us. (They had quickly gobbled up media agencies to become the largest digital media agency in the world.)

3. Attribution

Wait—weren’t “big data,” sexy dashboards, and blockchain technology supposed to deliver attribution insights and transparency? I’m more confused than ever!

In a fragmented media landscape, knowing which parts of your media mix are doing which job and working hardest (or not) is more important than ever. Shouldn’t ad-impact and sales attribution be getting smarter and more actionable, not more opaque?

Expensive MMMs (media mix modeling) services, supposedly demonstrating how different parts of the media mix work together, often rely on 1990’s assumptions and backward-looking or self-justifying math. I’ve personally never been impressed with these models and have never made a significant change in direction based to MMM “results.”

In the digital age, when you can easily track sales attribution from Facebook and Instagram ads and make real-time changes and optimizations, multi-touch attribution models may not only be obsolete, but they can also collapse under elementary scrutiny.

Which makes me wonder: is this because these MMM services are:

• Not able to deliver in a timely or actionable way, or

• Just selling open-ended “ongoing analysis” gigs, or

• Hiding the fact that their models just don’t work?

Clients expect clarity in this data-rich, direct-marketing-driven era. Instead, they’re sinking into ever-deeper, murkier water. You deserve better.

4. Accessibility

Is programmatic media limiting my options—not expanding them?

First, let’s define “programmatic media.” It’s the automated buying and selling of digital advertising space using software and data to target audiences in real time. The programmatic promise was added choice, reach, real-time optimization, and control.

But these massive platforms, now being sold directly to marketers and now also through the original safe “walled gardens” (e.g., Google, Meta) may now be closing off access to publishers, price discovery, and to transparency itself by taking advertisers’ spending “off-site” into murky “ad networks” and the fraud-filled open web.

This means that identifying quality media is getting even more difficult to secure, unless you do direct deals with publishers yourself.

Meanwhile, retail media networks (RMNs)—what Amazon, Walmart and virtually all retail grocery chains force brands to advertise in—now command a quarter to a third of all packaged good advertising budgets.

As a result of their astonishing growth, RMNs are selling more ads than they can accommodate and have effectively run out of ad inventory. So they’re going “off-site,” reselling programmatic buys to supposedly help their advertisers reach their target audiences.

Trouble is, programmatic platforms serve up unsafe “open web” inventory to advertisers, with everyone pocketing secret markups along the way while exposing brands to further ad fraud.

Reintegration, transparency and accountability are the solutions you need to demand

I believe that the only way out of this mess is to work with agencies who’ve put all the disciplines back together in one integrated, collaborative, and transparent practice.

Back in 2008, at Conductor’s successor shop in New York, Protagonist, we integrated our advertising, media and entertainment practice, and it was thrilling to have big media brains collaborating at every step in the process.

We also went out of our way to cut our own media deals directly with safe publishers, cutting out any middlemen.

There are plenty of terrific small and mid-sized independent shops operating like this. But don’t hold your breath waiting for the holding companies and their agencies to follow suits.

Prioritize and pay for outcomes over output, and maybe what’s rewarded will be repeated.

The commission model is dead, but an equally simple model can replace it: ”pay for performance.” A piece of the actual action. Duh, right?

Think of it as a “commission on results” instead of a “commission on ad rates.”

My friend Matt Seiler actually pioneered this at both Omnicom and Interpublic, and he has the war stories to prove it. Reach out to him and ask him for advice.

Stay current, stay skeptical, get smart, cut your own media deals, and don’t get ripped off

You can start by asking my “4A Questions” then acting on what you find out.

Read, learn, and talk to your network. Look for agencies who’ll deliver “integration, independence, and integrity.”

And follow me, Maarten Albarda, fraud-buster Augustine Fou, and others who are passionate about returning integrity, transparency and trust back into this business.

We can help…but with no cops on this beat, it’s ultimately up to you.

Notes & Sources

https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/406655/normalizing-principal-media-buying-is-not-normal.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=readmore&utm_campaign=138840&hashid=97AMdvIMSoCslVzeBhMIBQ

https://chatgpt.com/share/687ce8eb-48b0-800f-8e20-c2d5211aced2

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-principal-media-era-ben-shepherd-ugapc/

https://www.mi-3.com.au/25-03-2025/clients-it-boatloads-cash-complex-opaque-corporate-structures-principal-media-arbitrage

https://adage.com/article/agency-news/mediacom-ceo-mandel-skewers-agencies-incentives/297470/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-09/robots-not-humans-fake-23-of-web-video-ad-views-study-finds

https://www.performancemarketingworld.com/article/1915733/principal-based-media-buying-dark-side-adland

https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/407271/stagwell-centralizes-media-taps-assemblys-adams.html

My April ad fraud post »

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[Just for fun, a NYC street scam update]