‘We just did the math’: The new baseline for ad tech transparency 

And the problems aren’t confined to a single link in the chain. 

SSPs are a case in point. They remain one of the murkiest sections in large part because they take their cut before the bid ever reaches a publisher, giving buyers no line of sight into what was removed or why. Some SSPs will disclose their economics when pressed. Others refuse. 

In fact, one exec at the summit’s town hall recounted seeing a 65% gap between the bid their team submitted and what the publisher ultimately received, with no explanation of how much the SSP was responsible for. They ended up piecing it together themselves. The publisher’s closing bid was visible, the DSP fee was disclosed, the add-ons were simple to isolate and there was no other intermediaries in the path. The source of the missing dollars wasn’t hard to pinpoint. 

“We just did the math and figured it out,” said the ad exec. 

That’s not to say ad execs don’t understand why SSPs behave the way they do. Much of the behaviour stems from the economic reality of their place in the ecosystem. SSPs are squeezed, fighting for margin in a market where every other participant is also taking a cut. That pressure nuggets them toward practices buyers interpret as opaque. Even so, buyers need clarity on take rates. Without it they can’t set bids confidently, can’t anticipate the quality of inventory they’re likely to win and can’t justify why more than half of their spend disappears between the bid and the publisher. 

“I get why they [SSPs] do it,” said another ad exec in the town hall. “They’re under pressure, they’re trying to survive but it still leaves us in a spot where we can’t see what’s happening.”

That backdrop explains why Mindgruve is rethinking how it engages with SSPs, from who it works with to how contracts are structured to the level of transparency expected. As its svp of global media Ellyn Savage put it on stage: “We want the most direct publisher supply we can get. That’s our expectation working with SSPs – its to get transparency on where we ran.”

Next year, that expectation will translate into a tighter, more contractual SSP strategy built around fewer partners, mandated log-level access, deeper operational alignment and curated pathways. It may even formalize this as an annual processing using recurring RFPs or lighter touch RFIs to keep pace with how quickly SSP models are changing.  

“Going into 2026 we probably will have a similar but slightly different handful of SSPs that we work with, Savage added. 

Getting there has required a reset. Six months ago, Savage’s team was spending across six SSPs. Today, that list is down to four. One partner fell off because the agency couldn’t meet its minimum spend expectations. Another balked at sharing the impression-level data the agency considers table stakes so the relationship ended. Those experiences hardened the agency’s playbook and clarified what not to access in a SSP partnership. 

“Ultimately, this is really about finding partners that will work with you, understanding what rates they’ll give you and then how transparent they will be,” said Savage. “You really do have to ask for that transparency upfront.”

More often than not it will be agencies saying these things. After all, they’re the ones buying the inventory and encountering the operational friction. That said, there are some marketers with more hands-on programmatic expertise who are reaching the same conclusion: the SSP market has shifted, and the old way of working no longer serves them.

“A lot of the work we did in 2024 was focused on putting controls in place on the DSP side so then we wanted to push the SSP side,” said Paras Shah, senior director of digital media at Georgia-Pacific. 

At the same time, new channels are magnifying the stakes. 

CTV remains a black box. Buyers still struggle to get basic delivery data or reliable insight into where ads actually ran. 

“You don’t know what episodes you ran on. You don’t even know the show,” said an ad exec during the town hall. 

Another expanded on the point: “Everywhere you look, no one’s giving you the information you need.”

It’s a similar issue in retail media.

“They claim they have the data but there’s a lot of sophistication that needs to happen behind the scenes: offline-to-online stitching, what’s PII, what’s not – all of that is still TBD,” explained another exec during the town hall. 

And then there’s the AI layer. The concern isn’t that it introduces new problems so much as it accelerates the ones already baked into the market: polluted signals that feed MFA, incentive structures that price efficiency over scrutiny and auction dynamics that are already hard for buyers to decode. AI compounds those issues quickly, As more of the advertising process shifts to autonomous systems, buyers risk losing visibility into not just where money goes but why the system is making the choices it does. 

In effect, AI threatens to harden the worst parts of the ecosystem.

“I think one of the challenges we face in this industry is now we’re being fed AI as a cover for more vagueness in pricing, more vagueness in performance optimization,” said one ad buyer during one of the summit’s town halls. 

The renewed transparency push isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s arriving at the same moment referral traffic collapses are starving publishers and more ad dollars shift into walled gardens that offer scale but no independent verification.

If the open web can’t fix transparency now, it  risks losing not just trust but relevance.