As featured in MediaPost, read the full article here.
Ten years ago, the ANA’s K2 Intelligence report exposed systemic opacity across the media buying industry. This month, I sat in the ANA’s 10-year check-in. The data showed genuine progress in places. It also confirmed what I have been telling clients for years: awareness and control are not the same thing, and the industry has consistently confused the two.
Ninety-six percent of advertisers now know what principal media is. Only 58% use it. Of those, more than half allocate less than 10% of their budget to it. Ninety percent are uncertain whether their agency’s recommendations around it serve their interests. A decade of awareness has not translated into a decade of control. The problem was not solved. It was repackaged.
I understand why the progress narrative is appealing. Programmatic working media ratios have improved from 36% to 43.3%. Over half of advertisers have updated their agency contracts. Made-for-advertising site exposure has declined. These are real wins. But in the same period, new forms of opacity have emerged: walled gardens, offshore trading intermediaries, influencer spend with no audit frameworks, and now agentic AI trading systems operating in supply chains with no contractual governance. In some cases, reported structures involve offshore intermediaries acquiring inventory at steep discounts and reselling it at full rate, with rebates flowing back through the chain without disclosure. Where transparency is absent, this kind of arbitrage can operate invisibly. That is a direct evolution of the 2016 K2 risk patterns, now embedded deeper in the supply chain and harder to detect.
Advertisers are losing visibility faster than they are gaining control. I see it in our client work consistently. The response is governance.
Hire for financial rigor.
Apply the financial rigor to media that you apply to every other major expenditure. This is the foundational argument I make to every client, and it is the one the industry most consistently resists. A capital expenditure of comparable size to most large media budgets would require independent financial review, clear asset ownership, and audit rights as a matter of standard corporate governance. Media investment rarely gets that treatment. It sits in the marketing function, managed as an operational relationship rather than a financial one. That classification is what makes opacity possible at scale. The CFO has independent finance staff. The CMO needs the equivalent for media: expertise that does not depend on the agency for its data, its benchmarks, or its conclusions.
Reframe the principal media question before you rewrite the contract.
The ANA data shows 90% of advertisers are uncertain whether principal media recommendations serve their interests. The industry treats this as a trust problem. I think it is a disclosure problem, and that distinction matters. The question is not whether to use principal media. It is whether you have sufficient transparency to evaluate it on equal footing with other options. When disclosure is complete and incentives are visible, principal media is a commercial decision you can make with confidence. When they are not, it is a governance failure operating below your line of sight. Require your media plan to explicitly identify principal media inventory by name, designate a single internal approver for all non-transparent services, and operationalize disclosure tracking. That combination converts an opacity risk into a manageable commercial arrangement.
Treat your contract as a living document.
Review and update it annually; it is your primary governance instrument. It should explicitly address governance, financial transparency, and data ownership, as well as centralize all disclosed information in a shared record to create institutional knowledge that can outlast individuals.
Govern your programmatic supply chain.
The 22-percentage-point working media gap between top and bottom performers is a governance outcome, not an industry condition. To close it, know every DSP and SSP in use, and reduce SSP counts to five to seven while establishing direct contractual relationships with partners outside the agency relationship.
Treat independent verification as the equivalent of financial audit, not a signal of distrust.
Most advertisers audit the money. Fewer audit whether the money actually worked. Building that capability now, before it is mandated, is the difference between a governance asset and a reactive cost. Independent audits are what makes findings credible and actionable. The scope should cover contract compliance, media quality, and longitudinal effectiveness, not just financial reconciliation.
The ANA confirmed what I see in practice every day: opacity is not a legacy problem waiting to be solved, it is an active condition that requires active management. Pull out your agency contract this week. If it does not address principal media identification, AI trading governance, and data portability, it is already out of date. Fix that now.
To discuss how these findings apply to your media investment and what leading advertisers are doing now and next, contact us here.
