Concerns about agency transparency don’t appear to have diminished with a new global study showing a high percentage of brands would consider bringing some of their programmatic spend in-house.

The study was done by London-based programmatic agency Infectious Media and was based on 200 interviews with marketers from APAC, Europe, North America, the Middle East and Africa.

It found that 86 per cent of marketers interviewed said that they planned to take some part of programmatic in-house to manage on their own.

Some 74 per cent of respondents also said they had issues around transparency with their media agencies. While 73 per cent agreed that they did not believe media agencies were equipped with the tools to measure programmatic correctly.

A further 66 per cent said media agencies lacked control for ad targeting and serving, and 53 per cent agreed that the issue around transparency was due to a deterioration of trust between the agency and client.

When it comes to the reason marketers wanted to bring programmatic in house, transparency (68 per cent) was the chief reason, followed by better control (65 per cent) while marketers (71 per cent) said they had more qualified employees to handle the job.

Not that it was all doom and gloom for agencies, with a whopping 96 per cent of respondents agreeing that agencies will continue to play a role in programmatic.

Commenting on the findings, Infectious Media CEO, Martin Kelly, said: “Agencies will need to adopt a more flexible, hybrid approach that caters for advertisers’ specific requirements as well as their desire for greater control over their digital advertising.

“This will be crucial if agencies are to build a more effective and sustainable working relationship with brands in the future,” he said.