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This is your practical playbook, a strategy-first guide to stabilizing and growing eCPMs in today’s volatile environment.

You wouldn’t book a flight with three layovers if you could fly nonstop, right? So why settle for a multi-stop journey in your ad-buying strategy? As a programmatic trader, your job is to get from Point A (the media budget) to Point B (real outcomes) as efficiently and transparently as possible. But many programmatic paths are anything but direct. They’re littered with stopovers — DSPs, resellers, fraud filters, measurement layers — that drain fuel from your budget and delay arrival to your audience. Let’s walk through the programmatic journey — and how supply-path optimization (SPO) is your ticket for a direct flight to better return on ad spend (ROAS). What’s in your programmatic itinerary? Every trader knows that costs come with scale, data, and automation — but how much of your media dollar actually makes it through the entire journey? According to ANA’s 2024 benchmarks, only $0.44 of every ad dollar reaches the end destination: a real, viewable impression served to a human in a brand-safe environment. The rest of your budget? Waiting in line at security or stuck on the tarmac. Here’s the breakdown of that rocky route: Programmatic hop % of ad spend What it means Ad tax 29.8% Multiple intermediaries (DSPs, resellers, etc.) add markup and fees for each transaction — even if they add little value. Ad waste 26.3% This includes non-viewable impressions, invalid traffic (IVT), unmeasurable placements, and fraud. It’s like landing in the wrong airport entirely. Net effective spend 44% What actually delivers outcomes — aka the clean, final destination your campaign was targeting. Breaking down the ad tax What determines how much you spend on ad tax? An analysis of $235 million in ad spend found that well over half of transaction costs (56%) were charged by demand-side platforms (DSPs). How supply-path optimization (SPO) can boost ROAS This is where supply-path optimization (SPO) comes in. Think of SPO as your GPS for programmatic: it helps you plot the most efficient, cost-effective, and direct route between budget and performance. With SPO, you can eliminate advertising layovers and transfers like resellers and unnecessary intermediaries. Finding a more direct path for ad budgets to reach audiences creates efficiencies and offers major benefits for advertisers, including: Reduced costs: Fewer programmatic layovers means less fees. Transparency: Clearer insights into bidding, pricing, and inventory. Brand safety: Direct supply paths offer more control and reduce the risk of fraud. Sustainability: Fewer hops in the supply chain inherently reduces how much energy is used to deliver an ad. These efficiencies ultimately improve ROAS because more ad spend actually reaches your audience. So, what’s the easiest SPO route? Buying direct from a premium SSP. Direct flights only: Why SSPs are the express lane Working directly with an SSP is like flying business class, no layovers. No chaos, no mystery charges, and no detours through out-of-the-way airports. With SSPs that are validated by independent authorities (like Pixalate’s SPO Rankings or Jounce Media’s supply path reports), you can trade with confidence knowing the path is clear. As a media buyer, you’re the pilot of every campaign — and your passengers are ad dollars. You control the route, manage the fuel, and are responsible for a smooth, safe landing. So why take the long way? To ensure a smooth, profitable journey for your media dollars, work directly with a trusted SSP like Verve to reduce turbulence and eliminate hidden fees. Ready to skip the programmatic layovers and fly direct? Let’s optimize your programmatic flight plan. Book a strategy session and we’ll help you map it.

In recent years, the allocation of advertising spend has failed to keep pace with rapid shifts in consumer behavior and technology capabilities. As a result, many brands are pouring tremendous spend into the open web, neglecting the fact that targeting capabilities and consumer attention aren’t what they used to be. At the same time, brand safety concerns on the open web — despite more than a decade of intense scrutiny — continue to leave brands exposed when existing systems allow headline-grabbing nefarious content to slip through, as evidenced by the recent Adalytics CSAM report. The open web, as we once knew it, is struggling. Advertisers need to adjust accordingly—and fast. Let’s look at the forces contributing to a rapid decline in ad opportunities on the open web, as well as the new and more-promising opportunities that are emerging to fill the gap. The continued brand safety crisis Despite ad tech’s best intentions and good-faith efforts to combat the monetization of nefarious content, the most recent Adalytics report calls attention to the ways in which content filters can fail in the open web. This should serve as both a wakeup call and an opportunity for brands and their agencies to identify alternative ways of ensuring brand-safe ad placements. Open-web advertising relies on automated placements across a vast, unregulated landscape. Many advertisers lack full URL-level transparency, making it difficult to know exactly where their ads appear. Meanwhile, previously “safe” walled gardens are stripping away content moderation controls and other safeguards, compelling advertisers to turn elsewhere. Technical filters and moderation do a lot of heavy lifting, but they unfortunately are not always enough to prevent these egregious breaches of trust. Advertisers need to take a hard look at where they’re placing their programmatic dollars. White-listing has been a proven strategy against MFA and other undesirable UGC content, but the real opportunity now is in under-invested, high-quality channels outside the open web. The forces driving consumers away from the open web There are myriad industry shifts underway that are collectively altering the role of the open web in today’s larger media landscape. For example, Google is under immense scrutiny for its alleged monopolistic practices, and forthcoming regulatory mandates could dramatically reshape the services and data connections available to advertisers for use on the open web. At the same time, Google — and the rest of the digital ecosystem — is already repositioning itself for the future. That’s because the real disruption to both search and traditional display channels is coming from generative AI, which is steadily eating into search’s dominance as a way of finding and organizing information. As users increasingly rely on conversational interfaces to access information, they are not using traditional search platforms, and they are not seeing traditional search ads. Likewise, they are also not clicking out to third-party sites, meaning they won’t see display ads on those sites either. This behavioral transition is still in its infancy, but its long-term impact on the open web and our industry will be massive. A move toward quality and control As open web advertising continues to be plagued by upheaval and uncertainty, advertisers are beginning to shift their budgets away from long-tail cheap reach on the web and toward higher-quality, higher-control environments. Advertisers that diversify their media mixes with more direct supply on connected TV (CTV), mobile in-app, and digital out-of-home (DOOH) reduce their brand safety risks while improving outcomes on several fronts. The capacity for brand safety is built into the fabric of in-app and CTV in ways the open web can’t match. That’s because apps are vetted by the app store or device before becoming available to download on a connected TV or mobile phone. There are no blind placements because every ad runs in a controlled, verified environment with full transparency. For CTV and in-app, users have already opted in at least once (often twice on mobile). At the same time, buying direct inventory in these environments reduces costs by eliminating hops in the advertising supply path, ultimately improving ad spend efficiency. By prioritizing non-open-web channels, advertisers naturally prioritize inventory that is curated and largely pre-vetted for brand safety. In addition, these channels offer exclusive full-screen opportunities not available on the open web. This approach ensures advertisers don’t unknowingly fund harmful content. While brand safety vendors are a key part of the equation, the latest Adalytics revelations demonstrate that they are clearly not the only approach to ensuring brand safety.  As an industry, we must do more to ensure that our ad dollars are flowing to reputable, trustworthy and quality ad placements. Editor’s note: A version of this article originally appeared in Streetfight Magazine.