The Washington Post's Aram Zucker-Scharff: You can't solve transparency by adding more technology

For many, digital media's ills are down to the broken advertising technology that acts as the plumbing for the industry. Adam Zucker-Scharff, director of ad tech at the Washington Post, says it's more complicated than that: Advertisers are going to have to work at making ad tech transparent. “We’ve seen advertisers pulling back from the programmatic space because of these conflicts. We need them to be in this space,” said Zucker-Scharff on the Digiday Podcast. “It’s very easy to see how advertisers can lose trust in the system when there’s no transparency. It can’t be solved by adding another piece of technology. If you’re an advertiser, why do you need 12 viewability verifications? There’s a point at which you have to say you’re ready to give up a level of potential earnings in order to make our systems transparent and clear and to make sure you’re not ending up as vectors for stuff that’s to the detriment of users from a publisher’s level or an advertiser’s level.”