Marketers rethink cheap programmatic as ad waste mounts

The cracks started showing when the math stopped adding up. 

Cutting costs didn’t translate into better outcomes — just murkier supple chains and a whole lot of wasted ad dollars. The obsession with low fees had marketers optimizing for the wrong thing, propping up a system where the real winners weren’t advertisers or publishers, but the intermediaries skimming margins along the way.

Now, the tide is turning (sort of). 

Mars. Coca-Cola. VaynerMedia. Omnicom Media Group — the list keeps growing. More marketers and agencies are forging deeper partnerships with programmatic marketplace operators, or supply-side platforms (SSPs). The mechanics of these deals are complex, but at their core, they boil down to ad buyers asking programmatic marketplace operators one critical question: How much access do these companies have to quality ad inventory — and how much exposure do they have to the junk?

“We enforce accountability through structured contracts with our SSP partners, which explicitly prohibit resold media, ensure all inventory is ads.txt compliant, and restrict delivery to our inclusion list,” said David Nyurenberg, director of video product development and innovation at Rain the Growth Agency. “These agreements also require that inventory does not include MFA (Made-for-Advertising) sites. If an SSP fails to meet these standards, we require make-goods or credits to ensure compliance and financial accountability.”

They’re able to do this because the market has evolved. SSPs are under pressure to offer cleaner supply paths, log-level data is more accessible and transparency isn’t nice-to-have, but a business requirement for more marketers. Those who demand it are finally in a position to get it.

“There are a lot more buyers who are looking for the SSPs that can check the most boxes for them in a positive way,” said Matt Sattel, chief revenue officer at OpenX. 

If this all sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Supply path optimization (SPO) was supposed to fix this years ago by funneling ad dollars into fewer, higher-quality programmatic marketplaces. But for all the reasons above, it never quite stuck. Marketers, after all, don’t wake up thinking about ad tech plumbing. They care about customers, relationships and revenue. Now, ad tech has finally figured out how to help — at least for those willing to ask the right questions.

“Industry challenges like ad fraud, hidden fees, and inefficiencies have made agencies ask tougher questions of SSPs,” said Wayne Blodwell, global svp of programmatic at Assembly. “These challenges have led us to prioritize directness, transparency, and quality from SSPs to ensure the effective investment of media budgets.”

For his team, that means choosing SSPs with direct publisher relationships instead of a chain of intermediaries, strict adherence to Ads.txt to shut out unauthorized resellers, and deep integrations with brand safety and fraud prevention tools. The goal: a cleaner, supply path that actually does what it was meant to do.

Nowhere is that more crucial nowadays than in CTV, where marketplaces are overrun with resellers pushing the same impressions. To avoid bidding on those duplicates and inflating costs, agencies like Assembly are chasing more direct routes to CTV inventory. Doing so keeps budgets in check, preventing unnecessary ad tech fees and the redundancy of bidding for the same impression multiple times.

Whether any of this actually moves the needle is another question. Programmatic had made plenty of promises about prioritizing quality and transparency over the years, only to let cost-cutting and rebates take the wheel every time. The difference now is that more buyers actually seem willing to follow through. Not all of them, but enough to make it harder to ignore. 

“I’d say around 80% of the buyers we’re working directly on SPO are now well past negotiating those deals primarily on commercial — it’s now more about supply chain integrity too,” said Kyle Dozeman, chief revenue officer of Americas at PubMatic. “Buyers are increasingly focused on transparency and quality in their ad supply.”

That doesn’t mean marketers have stopped scrutinizing costs in the programmatic supply chain. In fact, they’re watching more closely, cross-checking SSP take rates with publishers to flag and fix any discrepancies. But they’ve also learned that slashing fees isn’t the endgame. The real question is whether those fees are actually paying for something that matters. 

“Fee transparency remains a major challenge because DSP log files only provide an aggregate media cost that includes both SSP fees and publisher payments,” said Nyurenberg. “SSPs privately negotiate their fees with publishers, meaning there is no consistent or standardized way to break down their take rate.”

The fact that conversations like this are happening more frequently speaks to how the dynamic between agencies and ad tech vendors is evolving. For years, demand-side platforms (DSPs) were the ones closest to agencies while SSPs stayed in the background. That’s changing. Agencies now lean on SSPs for deeper intel on how impressions are sourced and sold.

This shift is reshaping how agencies structure deals, with many striking annual preferred partnerships with up to five SSPs that increasingly prioritize supply chain integrity over just cost-cutting. These aren’t rigid contracts, but rather benchmarks agencies use to track performance. If the investment delivers, the deal gets renewed. If not, they reconsider. Whether they’re renewing or reconsidering, the decision is no longer just about costs and rebates — it’s about supply chain integrity, direct publisher relationships and access to premium inventory. For once, programmatic buyers are optimizing for more than just price.