With 20 years’ experience in digital advertising, NDA columnist Stevie Antonioni has worked with premium publisher brands such as The Telegraph, LADbible, and Spectator. She recently joined Adnami as UK MD.
Remember when transparency was the hottest word in advertising? For a few years there, you couldn’t walk into a meeting without hearing it.
Transparent pricing, transparent supply chains, transparent reporting. Every deck had it. Every brand demanded it. Every tech vendor claimed to offer it. One minute I was frantically googling blockchain and then, somewhere between GDPR, the death of cookies, and the rise of AI, the conversation quietly disappeared.
It’s strange. We now talk obsessively about trust and safety, but rarely about transparency. And yet, you can’t have the first two without the last. Trust without transparency is just good PR.
The digital advertising ecosystem – the most data-driven industry in the world, remains astonishingly opaque. Most of us have simply stopped asking awkward questions (not me, never will). Because the answers, when you find them, are rarely pretty.
Take programmatic.
Once heralded as the ultimate efficiency machine, programmatic promised advertisers real-time, accountable trading – the financial markets of media as it were. But a decade later, it’s more like the subprime mortgage market of media: layers of intermediaries, black-box algorithms, and fees that vanish into the ether.
The ISBA and PwC Programmatic Supply Chain studies laid bare just how bad it is. Only around 51% of advertiser spend actually reaches the publisher. The rest evaporates into what’s euphemistically called the “tech tax” – a mix of hidden fees, data costs, bid shading, and intermediaries you’ve never heard of. The ANA’s follow-up in the U.S. found similar leakage. Worse, even after years of promised clean-up, 15% of spend was still completely untraceable, a “data gap” nobody could explain.
Imagine telling a CMO that half their TV budget disappeared somewhere between ITV and Sky’s transmission tower. Yet in digital, we shrug and move on.
Here’s the real kicker: every time a new layer of “efficiency” is added to the chain, it creates a new layer of opacity. Supply Path Optimisation, Demand Path Optimisation, contextual AI bidding – all designed to simplify, but each one quietly adding another decision-maker, another fee, another black box.
And while brands have wised up to the idea that not all impressions are equal, the system still rewards volume over value. Many DSPs still optimise for cheap reach, not clean reach. The result is a marketplace so distorted that even the most diligent marketers can’t tell who’s making what, or why.
It’s not just money that leaks, it’s confidence. Publishers lose out on fair revenue. Advertisers lose control of their budgets. And the user, the person actually seeing (or ignoring) the ad, is still left wondering why they’re being stalked across the internet by that pair of shoes they already bought.
So where do we go from here?
First, we stop pretending opacity is inevitable. It’s not. Some markets are already proving it. The Nordics, for example, are miles ahead, fewer intermediaries, tighter publisher alliances, and direct relationships between buyers and sellers. The result? More transparency, higher quality, and better outcomes.
Second, we start valuing clarity over complexity. The most effective media plans aren’t always the most sophisticated, they’re the most accountable. That means fewer hops in the supply chain, open reporting, and partners willing to show exactlyhow every pound is spent.
And third, we need to bring the conversation back to basics: If transparency isn’t the foundation of your digital strategy, you’re building on sand.
The irony is that attention, arguably the industry’s new darling metric, also depends on trust. If we can’t even trace our spend with confidence, how can we expect advertisers to believe the attention numbers we show them?
Transparency shouldn’t be a differentiator. It should be a hygiene factor. We don’t need another “transparency framework” or roundtable. We need fewer middlemen, cleaner pipes, and contracts written in plain English. But we also need agencies, and especially brands, to start asking tougher questions about where their media really lands. Too often, campaigns go live with little visibility into the quality of the inventory being delivered. And when someone finally does take a closer look, the findings are rarely flattering.
The truth is, transparency was never trendy, it was just uncomfortable. But comfort doesn’t build credibility. Clarity does. It’s time we started talking about transparency again, not as a buzzword, but as the bare minimum.
Because if half your money disappears before your ad is even seen, what exactly are you paying for?
