Given our business doesn’t have oodles of corporate lawyers and accounting staff, the financial side of it’s management is left to those that have a general understanding, and most importantly, a willingness to do the right thing by people. Be that for Staff, Customers or Suppliers.

Knowing the history of the business, why our parent company was founded back in 1979, and how positively we internally discuss each other, customers and suppliers, it was a little left-field to be recently told on email that I was “lacking any measure of basic human decency” and that apparently I believe I “set the timelines for the world, and other people can either fall in line or …”, I’ll spare you the French that was there….

And you know my crime?

Trying to collect on 2 Invoices that were more than 4 Months Overdue to one of my partners, and therefore ensuring our business was not getting paid either. And to us, it was a relatively decent sum of money.

But what’s that got to do with Digital Advertising?  Well a fair bit if you believe, like I do, that there’s no such thing as “Business Ethics”.

Or to put it another way, “there’s no such thing as having ethics in business”.

Either you as a person have Ethics, or you do not. It’s got nothing to do with business.

And that’s where we get to Digital and running client campaigns ethically because of who you are.

It started when I naively heard about a listed publisher that had recently brought one of my client publishers into their fold. My client had reason to go to a group session on digital advertising and when he asked about delivery on such narrow campaigns and how they compensated for underdelivery he was told “That doesn’t happen. If it looks like we might fall short then we just open up the Geotargeting, the Client would never know”

And only this week it was reinforced when I was reminded that terms were different to many others because we accepted cancellations without penalty up until the start of the campaign. But that’s just being ethical as far as I can tell?? We haven’t incurred media costs until the campaign start, that’s the nature of Programmatic. But apparently that’s not the model everyone uses as I was told about fixed terms on Facebook Insertion Orders (not by Facebook, but Agencies who manage FB campaigns for clients like we do) which meant that even if a campaign wasn’t performing, the Advertiser was locked into the signed end dates and worst of all – the number of amendments that would be made to the campaign to make it work!

Come on, that’s not ethical.

We’ve found that a key skill in running Digital Advertising campaigns, particularly for the Private Agency and Direct Client Market in which we excel, is to be really detailed in the briefing process. Manage expectations really well upfront, present a fair price at which everyone gets value, make life easy for the client in the implementation process and be clear and confident about areas of their campaign you don’t think they are going to get the best results from (ie you have suggested improvements and for some reason it can’t be done by them). Sometimes it means telling them what they don’t want to hear. But most often clients appreciate it like an Agency owner who endorsed us recently and in one part said our

“knowledge of digital media is matched by a resolve to achieve a result for their clients and often Michael’s counsel is based on what not to do, as much as what we should be doing.”

So all in all, I’d suggest that you get to know your suppliers a little bit in this messy digital advertising industry. And keep in mind that they definitely don’t have “Business Ethics”. They have “Ethics” in all areas of their life. Or they don’t in any area.

Or at least take on board the wise words from my ‘client’ who has delayed paying many thousands of dollars of invoices when he added in wisdom “some people are decent and some people are not”.

Agreed

Cheers

MP