At the core of the argument is a critical notion:  transparency.

The less transparent things are in the marketplace, the more people will either (a) avoid it all together (and many people we coach with online marketing would definitely take this route if they found an excuse to lose confidence) or (b) simply not use the tools that lacked said transparency.

We’re entering an age of open and media-bohemoths like Google will have to focus on transparency in order to enhance the credibility of fledgling marketing efforts online.

UpStream Analytics takes a number of approaches to transparency, including the following:

1. Ensuring that publishers know how much they earned from network activities;
2. Improving on reporting tools so that people can compare revenue from various sources; and
3. Doing our best to identify where ads were placed when users bought through networks that we manage.

It’s the latter item that may prove to be the greatest challenge as we face conflicting objectives.  The objectives of a network are to ensure broad reach and to maximize the use of excess ad inventory.  One most occasions, this is done without disclosing the sites used because of reporting and technical limitations.

Of course, these conflict with the needs of an advertiser, which focus on knowing what they got when they click the ‘buy’ button.

What are your opinions on this?  Do you think there’s a workable middle ground?  What solutions have you experimented with that work for both advertiser and publisher?

We’d like to know – please share your thoughts below.

Some questions are already being raised by the move by Adobe to expand on its range of services, but we’ll have to wait and see what happens following the potential merger.

Publishers that use our system: