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Bringing it in house often doesn't help, tbh. There is less overt dishonesty and money grabbing. Frankly, for the companies that I've worked with, the office politics are not as vicious as that article portrays (note that I've never worked with a huge company - marketing is often just a few people, sometimes half a dozen to a dozen). It's really simply lack of knowledge. There is often a fair bit of know how, but that's simply knowing how to pull the levers. Unfortunately, for the firms that I've worked with, they don't have the budget to hire a real data scientist - someone with a PhD level understanding, or at least a good Masters level understanding, of statistical analysis and datasets/data-analysis. And even if you do, that doesn't guarantee that that person hasn't been completely seduced by the game, either. Most of the time, you have people doing the best that they can do, and learning on the fly, and if the prevailing wisdom is that the metric one must look at is CPM, or CPA, or more lately, visibility (you guys can blame that **** for the video ads that follow you on news sites), they are most likely going to key in on that, and publishers are going to follow the money.A lot of clients are starting to bring this stuff in house. There was a big shake out a few years ago of media agencies ginning up the numbers. The platforms do it as well.
Marketers running large campaigns have a lot to think about, and numbers are easy. You look at a matrix, and things seem just easier to think about and digest. So it's easy to become so very focused on hitting their goals in terms the latest metric that they really, really, forget to think about how human beings actually function.
It doesn't take a brain trust to figure out that annoying video ads with audio that block visibility of the content (something all out video ad agencies will swear their system can 100% avoid) will not get people to really "engage" more with it, other than frantically trying to find the nearly invisible, highly camoflaged "X" that must be somewhere on the page. But... your visibility scores are high, nearly 100%!, and the time spent in "engagement" gets higher and higher as you make that X harder and harder to find, so... every one is happy.