On April 30, 2021, the Mexican Chamber of Senators and Deputies passed a new law on “Transparency, Prevention and Combating of Unfair Practices in Advertising Contracting.” The law seeks to eliminate and prosecute non-transparent media practices between advertisers, media owners, and agencies. The law will go into effect on September 1, 2021.
Continue Reading Mexico leads media transparency efforts with new law

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and Reed Smith released a white paper – Media Buying 2018: Transparency at a Crossroads – reporting on the state of transparency in the advertising industry and the recently announced FBI criminal investigation into agency media buying practices. Pursuant to the FBI’s request, the ANA notified its advertiser members

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) released version 2.0 of the ANA Master Media Buying Services Agreement.  The original template was issued in July 2016 as a supplement to the ANA’s landmark report on media transparency, conducted with K2 Intelligence. Among other aspects, the new template includes language designed to reflect best practices on a

A putative class action lawsuit has been filed against Facebook, Inc. just one month after Facebook announced that an erroneous formula had caused it to inflate a key video metric for the past two years.

Facebook admitted the error in a September 23, 2016 post on the Facebook business page.  The metric at issue—the average

When businesses pay for goods and services, they generally like to receive them. Unfortunately, as any bankruptcy lawyer will tell you, this consistent desire is not matched by uniform experience.

Most recently, the bankruptcy of KSL Media again illustrated the risks and concerns when an advertiser entrusts significant funds to an entity that is too thinly capitalized or, as some allege, guilty of diverting funds that were to be passed through and in breach of a fiduciary duty to its clients. KSL’s bankruptcy, of course, was also noteworthy not because KSL was a start-up, but because it was not. We might expect capitalization risks with start-ups. But KSL was an established media company that failed. So the question remains: how can advertisers protect funds entrusted to suppliers, particularly those that are earmarked for payments to third parties?
Continue Reading Is There a Bankruptcy Lawyer in the House?