Programmatic expert lambastes reporting ‘magic tricks’

It’s not that Gil Snir is intentionally picking fights with large ad agencies. It’s just a coincidence that that’s where he sees a lot of the problems with programmatic taking place.

The CMO of Benchmarketing, a digital firm based in Australia, is featured in a video recently uploaded to YouTube that captures his keynote speech at a local adtech industry event. In his session, Snir took aim at everything from viewability concerns to bots, but saved most of his most vehement criticism to the way some agencies are sharing results with their clients.

As part of its services, Benchmarketing regularly conducts audits of programmatic campaigns, and Snir said too many brands don’t push back when it’s obvious reports have a few columns missing.

“This is the invisible magic trick 0f some of the agencies. There’s no budget, there’s no CPA, there’s just total numbers. Is it good or bad? No one knows,” he said. The same goes for agencies that present graphs about programmatic performance but offer no supplementary trend information. “Even worse, sometimes, are selective timeframes,” that leave out poor performance, he added.

Snir, who has worked in the programmatic space for seven years including stints on both the publisher and demand side, said agencies “didn’t like it” when advertisers started using technology more directly, which is why some of them have started creating their own in-house offerings.

“The problem comes when the agency says there’s a mandate that they can only use that in-house vendor,” he said. “Because what happens is there is a misalignment of independence, and as an advertiser, what you really need — if you’re not going to do this on your own and build a data science team — to trust that they have your best interests at heart.”

Perhaps as a result of this disillusionment with agency trading desks and other issues, Snir said the biggest problem is probably advertisers setting their expectations around programmatic too low. Power is now swinging away from publishers and towards advertisers, he said, and they should raise the bar accordingly.

Watch the full video below for Snir’s remarks.