AGENCIES STILL GETTING KICKBACKS

The result of these claims was an investigation by the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) in which non-transparent and crooked financial dealings were reported to be "pervasive" throughout the industry.

Since then it seems the ANA has produced a lot of hot air but not much progress. This week McKinsey issued a report that, according to AdAge, asserts that "not much has changed."

The essence of the report is that average kickbacks to agencies equal
   ... up to 5% for TV and radio
   ... up to 15% for outdoor
   ... 20-35% for digital.

The report claims that kickbacks to holding companies are often disguised as fees for worthless "research." Or are hidden in " 'co-mingled buys' where agencies leverage their collective client clout at the holding company level with TV networks to also buy inventory for their own accounts at discounts deeper than what clients receive, and which can then be resold to clients at substantial profit."

It is irresponsible to tarnish a whole industry with broad strokes about corruption. It would have been a lot more useful if McKinsey had been specific about where the kickbacks were occurring. I have a strong belief that smaller, independent agencies are not nearly as likely to be engaged in cutesy financial practices as the global holding companies. But until we get more detailed and specific information we just don't know.

This week one of the regulators for the EU said Google was engaged in “attempts to game the system,”  which had the potential to lead to a “travesty of at least the spirit of the new regulation, which aims to restore a sense of trust and control over what happens to our online lives.”

Meanwhile a group representing 4,000 publishers and media companies including The New York Times, the Associated Press, and Thomson Reuters, sent a letter to Google accusing them of practices that “would undermine the fundamental purposes of the GDPR...”

As we said in this space a few weeks ago, Google, Facebook, and the rest of the digital data weasels are "going to be busting their humps creating cynical legal interpretations of the GDPR which will take years for regulators to sort out." 

"One person types what he or she is requesting into the app, but must orally tell the other person what it is. That person then types into his or her phone what he or she will agree to, and a bar code is generated. The two people then hold their phones together and the app captures the bar code and makes sure that what was requested matches what was granted. This info is then encoded and stored securely in a cloud-based database."

Yeah, stored securely. So securely that it will take Facebook over 30 minutes to find out who you're having sex with, what you're doing, and how you like your eggs scrambled. 

Under the laws of the UK, they are required to give Carroll everything because the data was processed in the UK. This could turn into a very big deal. According to TechCrunch...

Carroll, who has studied the Internet ad tech industry as part of his academic work, reckons Facebook is not the sole source of the data in this case, telling the Guardian he expects to find a whole host of other companies are also implicated in this murky data economy ... "I think we’re going to find that this goes way beyond Facebook and that all sorts of things are being inferred about us and then used for political purposes,” he told the newspaper.

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