What is the biggest problem here?

The entire murky, nontransparent and in some cases fraudulent supply chain is the problem. It’s a bigger problem than just any one thing. There’s too much we don’t know and we don’t have validated.

Ads showing up on objectionable sites, that’s bad. Ads showing up to bots, through searching, that’s bad. Ads that you place that don’t really get measured by a third party that validates what’s right — that’s not so good, either. There’s a number of things in the digital media supply chain — even ads that aren’t viewable or close to viewable.

What will cleaning this up do for you?

What that will enable us all to do is make logical, data-based, reasonable decisions and, most importantly, spend time on what’s really important, which is great creativity to drive growth.

At the basis of this whole point is we’re not growing enough as an industry and the markets aren’t growing enough, so we need to spend time on products and packaging and shopping experiences and advertising to drive growth, and yet we have all this time spent in this opaque media environment. That’s the basis for why we, at least, are poking at this so hard.

How have technology companies, in particular, responded?

There are a lot of people that have come up to us and said thanks for calling this stuff out because we’ve been feeling the same way. It’s a lot of players out there saying we really need to make sure that we know what we’re getting, because at the end of the day, it’s a business. All we’re really asking for is here’s what we’re paying for, validate that we’re getting it, so we can then evaluate whether it’s a good deal. And if it’s two seconds, and it costs X, and lifts the business, we’ll do that. We just need to know that it really was two seconds, and how much it cost and then we can do that.