I am not going to copy and paste anymore, but as you read through the article it turns out Google (particularly through uTube) and Facebook, have both been fraudulent and misleading as well to large advertisers.
I can attest to abuses with Google with small business. Seems they had similar problems with large business. The problems were not just misreporting numbers and impressions and the like, but also the well publicized placing ads on extremist and fake news sites.
This is being used by agencies to say, come back to us, we will protect you and do it right.
It seems the one party that I know of, who is attempting to make their billions on this is TTD. I do not know enough about the industry to know who else is doing so. My experience is, is that a well run company gone public almost always signifies that the public company is also the leader in the field that it focuses on. For TTD that would be demand side programmatic, along with streaming media (particularly in Asia).
TTD is selling itself as the fair shooter. They are not beholden to the publishers (such as Google and Facebook). They do not buy the ads and take kickbacks. They service only the ad buyers, with all the services that are suppose to provide honest and detailed information, avoiding dangerous sites and fake news sites, and all the other things that ad buying companies are complaining of.
The one large issue TTD has is dealing with the walled gardens of Facebook and Google. TTD cannot buy ads on their sites. So TTD has moved around the world where Facebook and Google do no dominate. They have moved to pioneer radio and streaming television advertising (there has to be a very low inventory of ads on these latter two services because the ads on Pandora are utterly irrelevant to me. I am not that old, but the ads are meant primarily for college students. There is no data going into these ads. The most effective ones on streaming TV come from networks like the CW who have made their ads almost exactly like that you see on the live feed. A large variety, and a few actually are relevant to me because of this. But CW is not using TTD for this).
In fact, I do not think TTD will do very well in the U.S. market for streaming media. The most effective ads I see do not use their services. May just be a lack of ad inventory, but it is also a lack of data and means to implement that data.
I have no information about how it may work in Asia however.
Anyway, if you want to invest in a company that is trying to counter the behemoths of Google and Facebook, and sis showing great success at a very small size (don’t know if this is the low hanging fruit or the start of something great), TTD is the company.
Tinker