Ten years is generally considered long enough to get over most things — a bad haircut, a regrettable merger, even a presidential administration. But the advertising industry's crisis of confidence in media transparency, it seems, has proved more durable than any of these.

A new survey from the Association of National Advertisers suggests that marketers remain deeply concerned about whether they are getting what they pay for when they buy media through their agencies. The findings arrive a full decade after the trade group's landmark 2016 report, conducted with the consulting firm K2 Intelligence, which documented the existence of undisclosed rebates flowing from media sellers to agencies — a revelation that prompted approximately six months of industry soul-searching followed by several years of very expensive audits.

The concerns have not abated, according to the A.N.A., and in some ways have grown more complicated. The media marketplace of 2016, which seemed bewilderingly fragmented at the time, now looks almost quaint compared with today's landscape of programmatic exchanges, retail media networks, connected television platforms and whatever else emerged while this sentence was being written.

The survey findings suggest that many advertisers still do not feel they have adequate visibility into where their money goes and what, precisely, they are receiving in return. (Whether this represents a failure of agencies to provide transparency, or a failure of marketers to read the contracts they signed, is a question the survey does not fully resolve.)

The A.N.A. has spent the intervening decade issuing guidelines, convening committees and encouraging its members to demand better terms from their media partners. That the organization is still issuing surveys about the same underlying anxieties suggests either that the problem is genuinely intractable, or that some anniversaries are simply too useful to let pass unremarked.

The agencies, for their part, have consistently maintained that they operate with appropriate disclosure and that the relationship has improved considerably since 2016. This is the sort of statement that is technically uncheckable and therefore survives indefinitely.

Original story published in adage.com: "ANA: Media concerns persist 10 years post-rebate scandal - Ad Age"