When it comes to true transparency in digital advertising, it appears that the industry can’t afford its own morals. All parties, from brands and agencies to tech and platform vendors themselves say that transparency into brand suitable placements and fees are key values, but their actions render these sentiments somewhat toothless.

From a brand’s perspective, the idea of Transparency in digital advertising couldn’t be more straightforward: tell me where my ads appeared and how much I paid for those placements, and how much of my budget went to media and vendor fees? In reality, the answers require reporting and analysis, which, given the scale of today’s campaigns are enormously complex tasks to accomplish. That complexity also makes them very expensive.

Learning how to capture placements and analyze brand suitability and fees are tech problems, and in an industry defined by machine learning, data science, AI and so on, you may ask: why haven’t these problems been solved yet? Well, I would posit that the industry doesn’t really want transparency because it exposes some inconvenient truths.