Transparency is the advertising industry’s most dangerous buzzword
Anne Parsons explains how ‘transparency’ has lost its way in a world of buzzwords and confusingly shiny new tech toys. The only guaranteed result? Dwindling client trust.
Have you played the advertising game, the one where you try to get marketing people to complete sentences that don’t include buzzwords?
You can find the most opinionated of practitioners stuck for lucid conversation when you remove the prevailing vocabulary: programmatic, measurement, optimisation, disintermediation, digitisation, diversification, transparency, viewability, sustainability.
BRAVO.
I built 2 successful agencies in my career on the agency side. Both were based on 3 words.
OPEN HONEST & FRANK.
Everything flowed from there.
We held clients for many years.
We built their brands together. And they built ours.
Not brain science really, just common sense. And yes, TRUST.
Congratualtions.
Yours are the stories that now need to be told
Great article Annie and insight into the current Brand-Agency state of play. Surely the solution is then just providing this said transparency, and the word is no longer a “weasel”?
NM
Agree. We need to make the word a positive one again. Or indeed, that it never needs to be mentioned.
Exactly. Communicate with clients and provide the detail. They want it. And then not only won’t it be a weasel, we won’t even have need to use it .
Not entirely sure what the actual point of this article is other than to sell OOH and bag out digital again. “The dark art of digital’……please. Change the record will you?
The lack of trust can be attributed to agencies trying to slice more money from their clients having spent the last 15 years undercutting each other to win business.This is turn leads to squeezing media owners to drop their rates and in turn, quality. Much of the “trust” you mention stems from agencies own behavior and greed.
Please let me clarify. Digital is now just part of the communication repertoire and it’s a great part. The Out Of Home industry is thriving by using its Digital capability to provide a greater communication channel than previously existed. The dark art of Digital only relates to its abuse and this has come at the hands of human intervention and manipulation in several areas. Consider the record changed.
Buzzwords eh? OOH ….
Not a buzzword so much as an acronym- and trying to save three words by using just one with a word limit
the new buzzword is calling out buzzwords
Transparency only exists in the absence of trust.
How is ‘measurement’ a buzzword? Surely it is a fundamental part of marketing. Or is it just because OOH results are largely unmeasurable…