#54: Quo Vadis Green Shoot AdTech Interviews
With Jamie Barnard, Co-founder and CEO of Compliant
Reading Time: 6 Minutes of Compliance
Welcome back to Quo Vadis Green Shoot AdTech Interviews.
In this series, we’re stepping into the shoes of “AdTech Equalizers” — the greenshoot companies changing how the advertising job gets done. We'll delve into their worldview and unveil new strategies, tools, and thinking that make advertisers better off.
Today you’ll hear from Jamie Barnard, the co-founder and CEO of Compliant, a technology company that helps brands, agencies, and publishers simplify data compliance across the media supply chain.
Q: We first met in Cannes when you were working for Unilever. What was the trigger for setting up on your own?
A: Jamie
As it happens, Cannes ‘22 turned out to be something of a job interview, so I guess that went well in retrospect. I spent 15 amazing years on the frontline with Unilever, managing the tension between digital innovation and privacy as General Counsel for Global Marketing and Media. One of the most rewarding aspects of that role was my involvement in multiple coalitions to solve cross-industry challenges, from viewability and brand safety to cross-media measurement and online harms. By 2022, my heart was set on solving the toughest challenge of them all — data compliance in digital media.
Q: Why is data compliance so hard?
A: Jamie
It’s hard because it’s so complicated. The industry is dependent on tools, technologies, and practices that don’t meet modern expectations of privacy, and meaningful change requires every player in a complex and crowded ecosystem to adapt simultaneously. It’s strange to think that I left a global, €60 billion purpose-driven CPG company because I felt like I could make a bigger impact building a start-up to help companies just like that.
Q: So you co-founded Compliant. What’s the company’s mission?
A: Jamie
We’re on a mission to simplify data compliance in media and advertising. As society blazes a trail to a privacy-safe future, automating compliance is the only way forward.
Our technology helps advertisers measure the compliance of digital ad inventory, helps agencies optimize media investment with trusted publishers, and helps publishers demonstrate compliance to potential buyers.
By integrating compliance metrics into campaign planning alongside established metrics like viewability and brand safety, brands avoid wasting money on media that jeopardizes their own compliance and exposes them to unparalleled regulatory, financial, and reputational risk.
Q: Black Swans and other unexpected fall-outs are things that get busy marketers to move faster. You must be getting busy! What’s going on in the space that gets people into your world?
A: Jamie
For anyone remotely connected to the advertising industry, their Newsfeeds are peppered with stories about big tech, adtech, AI, and privacy.
In May, the Irish DPC fined Meta $1.2b for unlawful data transfers; in June, as you know, the ANA published a ‘first look’ at its Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study, reigniting faux-horror in the MFA super-swindle (the elephant graveyard where great advertising goes to die); in July, the European Commission approved the Data Privacy Framework, re-opening data flows between the EU and the US; and in August, Adalytics kicked the hornet’s nest with research suggesting widespread behavioral ad targeting on YouTube ‘made for kids’ channels. With TikTok’s latest fine and the passing of The Delete Act by California lawmakers in September, it’s clear that privacy concerns are reaching crisis point.
Q: That sounds bad. What’s changed?
A: Jamie
It is bad; so bad that I think we’ve finally reached the bottom of the barrel. For years, we all flew under the radar without much fear of detection. Unfortunately, trigger-happy regulators in the EU and the US have upgraded their weapons systems. Actions that went unpunished before, are firmly in the cross-hairs now. With enforcement intensifying, it is not the time to hold your breath and hope the storm passes — instead, companies need to lean in and regain accountability and control.
As if that’s not metaphor enough, think about it like airplanes flying around without air traffic control. Bad things are bound to happen.
Q: What is the first priority for brands trying to address this?
A: Jamie
One of the fundamental problems with the programmatic media supply chain is the lack of access to information. So the first priority in the battle for transparency is to measure data compliance across your owned and operated media, paid media, and ad campaigns.
Historically, and somewhat paradoxically, the online ad industry has never fully trusted transparency. There’s always been this sort of omerta, like a tacit but unspoken reluctance to switch the lights on and expose the inconvenient truths: safety, fraud, quality, the infamous data delta the swarm of unauthorized tags and pixels, and the scourge of data resellers. It’s like Adland’s ‘Bermuda Triangle’.
Furthermore, the level of margin a business creates in digital advertising is directly proportional to the information asymmetry they can force on the market so opacity creates commercial advantage — it is margin accretive and the tech giants know this. As a consequence, the shortcomings of the online advertising ecosystem have become the elephant in the room — a beast that we’ve learned to live with.
The YouTube situation is a case in point. If ads for Fortune 500 companies are being served on ‘made for kids’ channels, the brands end up unintentionally harvesting kids’ data and sharing it with dozens of data brokers on clickthrough. This is precisely what they are trying to avoid. Yet Google’s software controls make it hard for brands to exclude ‘made for kids’ channels. In some cases, it’s impossible to get granular placement reports so these adjacencies can’t even be verified. And brands continue to sign deals with platforms that allow for zero audit rights. It’s perplexing, but that’s how it goes.
Now extrapolate this one issue (targeting kids) with one channel (YouTube) to all the privacy issues across 44,000 publishers in a typical campaign: unconsented data capture, collection of sensitive information, unauthorized tracking, unlawful transfers, data leakage, etc. When you look at the general state of compliance across US and EU publishers, the picture is bleak.
Q: We like data at Quo Vadis. What does the data say?
A: Jamie
In March, we conducted a compliance audit of 750 US publishers, accounting for 81 percent of North American media spend. Of the 20% of US publishers with a consent management platform (CMP), a staggering 91% of them are passing data before consent is secured, effectively ignoring consumer choices. The average US publisher site contains 82 piggybacked tags (most of which are unauthorized by, and often unknown to, the website owner), five data resellers, and leakage across seven to 17 levels.
To quote the ANA, the programmatic media buying ecosystem is “riddled with material issues including thin transparency, fractured accountability, and mind-numbing complexity”. As I said before, automated independent verification is the only way forward.
Q: So what’s the one thing every brand should do today?
A: Jamie
Forgive the analogy, but it’s like getting your prostate checked. The experience may bring tears to your eyes, but prevention is better than cure. The problem isn’t going away and the longer you leave it, the worse it could get.
If you don’t yet have tools to measure data compliance across your media supply chain, then you should run rather than walk to get them. This should be a top priority for CMOs since it’s a choice between responsible media investment on the one hand and financial, regulatory, and reputational harm on the other.
Unless you’re measuring the data compliance of every publisher in your campaign, your media dollars will be taking a substantial risk. Viewability is a budget issue, brand safety is a reputation issue. Data compliance is a liability with unparalleled consequences.
Compliance Annual Audit: Learn more. Get it today.
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