"According to Gartner’s recent study, by 2023, 60% of CMOs will slash the size of their marketing analytics departments in half. Why? Because CMOs didn’t see the promised improvements come to fruition. Even though there has been a stable three-year trend of CMOs prioritizing marketing analytics as a key enabler in supporting marketing strategy, what brings this disappointment? Gartner surveyed 400 respondents and these were some key findings:

• A large proportion of senior marketers (CMOs and VPs of marketing) are unimpressed by the results they receive from their marketing data and analytics investments. 
• 54% of senior marketing respondents in the Marketing Data and Analytics Survey 2020 indicated that marketing analytics has not had the influence within their organizations that they expected. 
• Only 54% of marketing decisions are being influenced by marketing analytics."

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.