The advertising industry has long operated on a principle familiar to anyone who has ever split a check at a large dinner party: trust, but do not expect itemization.

That arrangement is now being tested by a major beverage company, which has commissioned an independent audit of its digital video advertising — including connected television and online video — that ran during the World Cup. The company wants to see precisely where its commercials appeared, how they were delivered, and what margins were extracted along the way.

Matt Wasserlauf, the chief executive of Blockboard, one of the vendors subject to the audit, said the move reflects a growing frustration among marketers. "Marketers want the receipts, and they haven't been given the receipts," Mr. Wasserlauf said. "All the demand-side platforms that are running these ads are giving them countless reasons why they can't provide those receipts."

Those reasons have included claims that sharing log files would be illegal, or that the files contain too much personally identifiable information to pass along safely. Mr. Wasserlauf said the auditor in this case has determined that neither objection holds water. (One wonders how long those objections were expected to hold.)

The audit arrives as live sports programming has migrated aggressively to streaming platforms, drawing billions of dollars in advertising with it. Yet for all that spending, the mechanics of programmatic video buying have remained stubbornly opaque. Mr. Wasserlauf noted that some buyers have never actually seen the commercials they purchased run during major sporting events — a situation he described as falling short of table stakes.

"It's not only 15 years," Mr. Wasserlauf said. "It's hundreds of billions of dollars where the marketer has no idea how their ads have been run."

Whether this particular audit becomes a template or an anomaly will depend on how many advertisers decide that dinner checks, however large, ought to be itemized after all.

Original story published in Digiday: "They haven’t been given the receipts’: Why one brand is auditing its DSPs for greater programmatic advertising transparency", by Blockboard