Industry360: Facebook and Google on tackling transparency
Industry360 gives Mumbrella readers a top-line view on what’s really going on in the media, marketing and advertising industries. This week we pose some tough questions to Facebook’s Naomi Shepherd and Google’s Kevin Ackhurst.
Naomi Shepherd, director, Facebook Australia and New Zealand
How can digital players tackle the transparency and measurement problems?
I think a lot of work here has already begun across the whole industry.
At Facebook we have driven through many changes already, in privacy, brand safety, measurement, plus there are new controls and greater transparency around data and and ads. People can now see every ad a page is running — even if the person wasn’t targeted. People can also filter ads by country and they can report an ad to us. We have also introduced new policies requiring advertisers to specify the origin of their audience’s information when they bring a customer list to us.
We all want greater transparency. It increases accountability for us and advertisers and allows us to get input from our community and experts, helps find and fix problems. We are committed to bringing more transparency and control to information we use.
Less of a tackle and more a bit of lip service really.
Can we ask for transparency about how they aggregate other peoples content & erode content rights value?
Or what transparency on how they act as super aggregators of data and build walled advertising gardens around harvested users?
Or maybe the business practice of sales bundling to the point of anti-trust?
Or the minimisation of tax obligations and & shipping profit out of the country?
Or how we have minimal transparency into their business decisions around refusing to work with regulators, avoiding to acknowledge duties & responsibilities of content moderation or election interference or a million other things.
This isn’t a tackle. Let’s stop worshipping social media. Let’s start demanding they uphold the basic standards of media, marketing and society at large.