Why Georgia-Pacific is turning its programmatic scrutinty to the sell side

Why? Because these ad tech platforms are plugged directly into the bidstream — the massive flow of data-rich requests sent to advertisers for every available ad impression — making them a critical leverage point for controlling inventory quality pricing dynamics and supply-path efficiency before bids ever reach a DSP.

“I think that’s where the next big focus area is for us,” said Paras Shah, senior director of digital media at Georgia-Pacific at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit earlier this month.

That kind of talk usually comes from agency leaders. Most brand marketers don’t spend enough on programmatic advertising to warrant this level of scrutiny, and those that do typically outsource it to agencies. Which is what makes Shah’s comments stand out.

“In 2025, we started to realize that a lot of the work that we did this year was focused on putting controls in place on the DSP side,” said Shah. “And so then we wanted to start to evaluate the SSP side.”

In practice, that means putting SSPs through a defined set of criteria and deciding where – and where not – to spend from there. The specifics vary by objective but the short list usually comes down to transparency, inventory quality and innovation – from fee clarity and direct paths to publishers to exposure to made-for-advertising site, curation tools and emerging agentic workflows. 

Or as Shah put it: “It will help us just really drive focus on which SSPs can help us curate the optimal inventory for our business.”

The underlying belief is that most SSPs are selling largely the same inventory with differentiation coming down to how it’s packaged, the data layered on top and the commercial terms that ultimately determine how far an advertiser’s dollars stretch. In that sense, the process looks a lot like the supply path optimization moves media agencies triggered several years ago – but this time driven directly by the advertiser. 

Shah and his team are able to take this approach with the help of SWYM.ai, an ad tech tool that helps curate supply and evaluate bidstream quality upstream of the auction. The goal is to automate the scoring and filtering of bid requests based on predictive performance, reducing redundant paths before bids flow through Georgia-Pacific DSPs and making buying decisions more efficient. 

“We already started that process through the supply path optimization approach we took in 2025 where we reduced the number of SSPs we worked with by around 70%.”

He did not say how many SSPs that leaves Georgia-Pacific working with. He did say the consolidation has not affected its ability to source inventory nor has it created pacing or scaling issues. Instead, it has pushed CPMs down by stripping out auction duplication – the inefficiency that occurs when a buyer ends up bidding against itself across multiple platforms for the same impression. By pruning redundant paths, Shah’s team also improves viewability and reduced waste, ensuring dollars flow only through partners with direct, high quality connections to publishers. 

The effect has been to turn down the noise in the bidstream, sharpen the signal on where media dollars actually perform and give the in-house team more leverage with the SSPs that remain. Shah expanded on the point: “One of the main areas for us is to continue to put optimization and controls in place on the SSP side in order to be able to get better effectiveness out of programmatic media as well as increasing the efficiencies too.” 

That Georgia-Pacific is taking this stance is hardly surprising. The advertiser has already applied the same logic to DSPs. Today, it works with four platforms in clearly defined roles: Amazon DSP for Amazon-specific campaigns, DV360 for YouTube, The Trade Desk for limited retail media use cases and Yahoo’s DSP as its primary buying platform. As with SSPs, DSPs have become largely commoditized, with access to similar inventory. Cost, service and responsiveness now matter more than any theoretical differentiation. 

“A big part of our initial in-housing work was about putting controls in place in the DSP,” said Shah.

That journey began in earnest in 2019. By 2024, Georgia-Pacific had built an eight-person team managing between $30 and $50 million in digital ad spend across its brands. The goal was never to cut out agencies entirely, but to gain tighter control over how its media dollars move through an increasingly complex supply chain. 

“This is really about doing your due diligence,” said Shah. “it’s not just set it and forget it at all.”

More marketers, particularly on the agency side, are beginning to come around to that way of thinking.

And SSPs like OpenX have pivoted accordingly. 

“For years, we’ve believed that the future of programmatic would be defined by smarter, more intentional supply, and we’re seeing buyers demand that now,” said Matt Sattel, the ad tech firm’s president. When you reduce duplicative paths and enforce quality at the source, you end up with a cleaner auction, a more predictable supply chain, and a buying environment that agencies can trust.