The damning Association of National Advertisers report on agency transparency in the U.S. in 2016 and the domain-spoofing scandals at the Financial Times and News UK illustrate the lack of transparency in programmatic media buying in the U.S. and Europe. That murkiness allowed unscrupulous practices such as media arbitrage and data arbitrage to flourish.
Buy-side marketers are finally realizing arbitrage’s harms and starting to take action. In a survey of 98 marketing executives at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summits in New Orleans and Portugal earlier this year, the majority of U.S. marketers and European marketers — 62 percent and 80 percent, respectively — agreed that combating data arbitrage and media arbitrage is important.
