Programmatic’s ‘era of blinders’ is ending with a push toward total transparency: TAG CEO

Digital advertising talks precision and AI, but still can’t answer the simplest question: where did the money go? Behind the buzzwords lies a broken system. Until marketers get full access to the raw, transactional data, there’s no real optimization, just guesswork at scale.

Mike Zaneis, President and CEO of the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) and Co-Founder of the Brand Safety Institute, says the era of opacity in digital advertising is ending.

Transparency or trash: “The era of blinders is over for programmatic advertising. Transparency is now table stakes,” says Zaneis. “Once marketers see the full 360-degree view of their ad spend, there’s no turning back.” For Zaneis, it’s simple: without full access to bidstream and log-level data, the system breaks. “Bidstream data shows how a transaction happens in real time. Log-level data records the actual deal,” he explains. “If you’re not seeing both, it’s garbage in, garbage out. Whether it’s SPO, curation, or AI—bad data means bad outcomes.”

TAG, you’re it: Untraceable ad spend remains a stubborn industry flaw, some estimates say 15 cents of every dollar disappears into the void. TAG’s answer, says Zaneis, is a multi-pronged push for transparency. “We launched the industry’s first and only Certified for Transparency program three years ago to spotlight companies that actually share their data,” he says. “That’s our role as a nonprofit, to bring the industry together, raise standards, and highlight the good actors. That’s our bread and butter.”

TAG’s tools go beyond certification. With TAG TrustNet, marketers can reconcile transactions and follow the money, every penny. “These tools aren’t proprietary,” Zaneis emphasizes. “We’re unlocking treasure troves of data. Marketers can see where their money goes, and exactly who takes a cut.”Over the garden wall: Transparency hasn’t reached every corner of the ad world. “We don’t have as much transparency in other areas,” Zaneis says, pointing to retail media networks where lines blur between owned-and-operated and audience extension. Social platforms face similar scrutiny. “Walled gardens provide lots of data, but some marketers want to get inside the garden to see the raw underlying data,” he explains. “That trend is just beginning.”

Shoot happens: As tools like OpenSincera roll out, Zaneis hopes they’ll do more than flood the market with data—they should sharpen how the industry handles brand safety. “We know the industry is disproportionately blocking news content because of brand safety fears,” he says. “More transparency and more data should lead to refinement, not just expanding blocklists, but testing what actually works.” The risk of lazy filtering is real: “If you block a single word like ‘shoot,’ you’re going to lose a lot of content, like an NBA Finals story. That’s not the goal.”

No more lockdowns: When The Trade Desk acquired Sincera, the industry braced for another data lockdown. But Zaneis says the opposite happened. “People were concerned access would disappear,” he says. “You have to applaud them for OpenSincera, making it available to the whole industry, even competitors.”

The move bucks a long-standing trend. “The concern is always that companies hoard valuable data,” Zaneis says. “This puts pressure on everyone to open up. Locking it all down can’t be the default anymore.”