IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) President and CEO, Randall Rothenberg opened the second day of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, focused on the theme “Publishers & Platforms: What’s Next?”. He went through the many challenges and threats they have faced as an industry, and he mentioned a new one: media supply chain of fake news. This is a challenge that is not only of the industry, digital media and marketing village “but a crisis of society writ large” he noted. For Rothenberg, there’s a linear connection between fake news and those trolls of digital marketing and media: click fraud, fraudulent non-human traffic, consumer data breaches, privacy violations, and the sources of ad-blocking. “Each represents the failure of our supply chain – the same kind of supply chain failure we at IAB and our members have dealt with repeatedly and successfully over the years” he said. “If you do not seek to address fake news and the systems, processes, technologies, transactions, and relationships that allow it to flourish, then you are consciously abdicating responsibility for its outcome, the depletion of the truth and trust that undergird democratic capitalism” Rothenberg highlighted. However, he recognized that actively banishing fakery, fraudulence, criminality, and hatred is a difficult and complex task, but “in a multidimensional industry that can invest untold billions on driverless cars, Mars missions, Super Bowl ads, next season’s prime-time lineup, and the acquisition of hot programmatic startups, surely we can fix fake news first.” And after that, he invited to fix, once and for all, ad fraud, opaque metrics, and the other ills that sully the industry, and diminish their ability to make good on the promise of the digital revolution.