Path Forward: Enhancing Programmatic Media Accountability

The challenges facing open web programmatic are real, structural, and well documented. They were not created overnight, and they will not be resolved by a single standard, platform feature, or contractual clause. At the same time, the system is not broken beyond repair. The same forces that created opacity can be redirected toward confidence if incentives are aligned and responsibilities are clearly understood.

The path forward is uneven. In the near term, most participants are forced to defend themselves within existing constraints. Over the longer term, meaningful progress depends on shared infrastructure and behavioral change across the ecosystem.

What follows outlines what advertisers, publishers, agencies, and platforms can realistically do now, and where the industry must ultimately go to restore economic confidence in open web programmatic.

For advertisers, the immediate path forward is largely defensive and financial in nature. Open web programmatic does not provide economic clarity by default, which means advertisers must manage spend as if they were deploying their own capital rather than purchasing a finished service.

Programmatic media should be treated as a financial system as much as a marketing channel. When large volumes of budget flow through complex supply chains, advertisers retain the financial liability for how those funds are used, even when execution is delegated. Economic vigilance therefore becomes a governance responsibility, not simply a media operations task.

Advertisers should recognize that agency relationships increasingly operate under mixed incentives. While agencies may be formally contracted as agents, cultural and economic dynamics inside large holding companies can create pressure for client spend to flow through higher margin products, proprietary buying entities, retail media environments, or outcome based models. In practice, this means agency representatives may face internal pressure to behave more like sellers of internal solutions than neutral stewards of spend.

The first line of defense is contractual. Advertisers should require clear disclosure of which legal entities are involved in buying, optimization, data usage, and outcome based execution. Contracts should include audit rights, log level data access where feasible, and permission for independent analysis. Without these protections, advertisers are structurally unable to understand their own financial exposure.

Second, advertisers can constrain opacity through channel selection. Where possible, shifting spend toward platform direct buying, large social and commerce platforms, and clearly defined private marketplace inventory reduces the number of intermediaries involved. This does not eliminate uncertainty, but it narrows the range of unknown value extraction.

Third, advertisers should actively use private and curated inventory access within DSPs. These mechanisms reduce substitution and duplication and make it easier to understand what is being bought. Fewer paths mean fewer opportunities for value to be obscured.

Fourth, advertisers need a working understanding of holding company structure. This does not require forensic accounting, but it does require asking which affiliated entities participate economically in execution, what services they provide, and how they are compensated. An agent based contract does not guarantee agent only economics across all affiliated activity.

Finally, advertisers should be able to answer a basic financial question if asked by their CFO or audit committee: how much of the company’s advertising spend is being absorbed by intermediaries rather than reaching publishers as working media. Public industry studies provide benchmarks and ranges, even if precise answers are difficult. Being unable to approximate this exposure is a governance risk in itself.

In the near term, success for advertisers is not perfect transparency. It is informed constraint. Reducing unknowns, avoiding the most problematic structures, and being able to explain how money flows through the system is meaningful progress.

Publishers maximize CPM and yield by reducing supply chain distance to advertisers, not by increasing auction density.

The most effective starting point is observation. Publishers should analyze who is already advertising on their properties by reviewing buyer seats, advertiser domains, and repeat demand patterns across SSP reporting. This reveals which advertisers already value the inventory, even through multiple intermediaries.

Once known demand is identified, the goal is to collapse the supply chain around it. Advertiser specific private marketplaces, curated deals, and direct programmatic paths routed through SSPs where those buyers already transact reduce unnecessary intermediaries and improve net yield. This is not a rejection of programmatic. It is a more deliberate use of it.

Publishers should also rationalize SSP relationships aggressively. More SSPs rarely mean more yield once demand duplication sets in. Reducing SSP count, removing redundant resellers, and enforcing direct selling paths where possible often increases net CPM and yield stability by improving buyer confidence.

ads.txt and related supply chain standards should be treated as yield levers, not compliance tasks. Removing unnecessary reseller authorizations and aligning authorized sellers with real demand reduces margin leakage and signals discipline to sophisticated buyers.

Publishers should make inventory easier to buy intentionally. Clear deal structures, predictable naming conventions, and placement level clarity reduce ambiguity that benefits arbitrage but harms yield. As identity becomes less deterministic, strong contextual and placement signals become increasingly valuable pricing inputs.

Finally, publishers should segment demand. High value advertisers should not be forced to access inventory only through the most intermediated paths. Open exchange can serve incremental demand, but premium demand benefits from more direct access.

Modern yield management is supply chain management. Publishers who optimize only for auction pressure will continue to leak value. Publishers who optimize for proximity to demand will capture it.

Agencies operate under intense economic pressure and face a structurally difficult position. They are expected to compete aggressively on price while delivering increasingly complex media outcomes at scale. Procurement led evaluation frameworks often emphasize visible fees while underweighting total economic impact.

Agencies therefore face two rational but divergent paths.

One option is to continue competing primarily on headline cost. Under this model, agencies meet procurement expectations by minimizing disclosed fees and rely on media throughput, bundled services, performance linked compensation, or proprietary buying structures to sustain margins. This approach aligns with how many pitch processes are run today and remains economically rational in the short term.

The cost of this approach is increasing. It carries reputational risk, reinforces mistrust, and traps agencies in an arms race where differentiation is limited and scrutiny continues to rise.

The alternative is more difficult but potentially more durable. Agencies can choose to articulate a different operating model, one that acknowledges the true economics of modern media buying and seeks to make them explainable to clients, procurement teams, and pitch consultancies. This requires clarity around how money is made, which affiliated entities participate economically, and how compensation relates to media execution and outcomes.

This approach complicates apples to apples comparisons, but it also creates differentiation in a market increasingly accountable to CFOs, audit committees, and boards. The current movement and restructuring within holding companies suggests there may be an opening for at least some players to move away from dependence on undisclosed media margins toward models built on economic legibility.

Agencies cannot solve this alone, but they do have agency. They can choose whether to continue optimizing for price illusion or invest in models that can be defended economically.

Platforms are foundational to programmatic media. They provide liquidity, automation, safety controls, and the abstractions that allow markets to clear at scale. Without them, the open web could not function.

At the same time, platforms are optimized to clear markets, not to explain them economically. Their abstractions intentionally collapse complexity, prioritize throughput, and normalize pricing signals. These features enable scale, but they limit bilateral economic understanding.

This is not a failure of intent. It is a consequence of design.

The most productive role platforms can play is not to promise full transparency, but to reward disciplined behavior and make undisciplined behavior economically unattractive. Consistent enforcement of supply chain standards, clear differentiation between authorized and unauthorized selling paths, and signals that favor clean, direct supply routes allow the market to price quality without requiring full disclosure.

Platforms are not positioned to act as auditors of economic truth, nor should they be expected to reconcile buyer and seller economics on behalf of the ecosystem. Their responsibility is to operate fair, enforceable markets where good behavior is rewarded and egregious behavior is priced out.

If platforms are optimized to clear markets rather than explain them, then improving economic confidence will require infrastructure that sits alongside platforms, not inside them.

Advertisers and publishers share a common problem. Advertisers struggle to understand how much of their spend reaches publishers. Publishers struggle to understand how advertiser value flows to their inventory. Contracts, competitive sensitivities, and platform abstractions prevent direct comparison.

A credible path forward is the development of neutral, third party economic reconciliation layers that allow buyers and sellers to compare outcomes without exposing proprietary pricing or strategies. These mechanisms would not replace platforms, nor require them to disclose sensitive internals. They would function as independent reference systems focused on economic alignment.

Such frameworks would allow participants to answer basic questions that are currently difficult to resolve. How much advertiser spend reached a publisher cohort. How value was distributed across categories of intermediaries. Whether changes in supply path materially affected net outcomes. These insights do not require full transparency. They require consistent, transaction level comparison under shared rules.

Neutrality is essential. These systems cannot be owned by buyers, sellers, agencies, or platforms if they are to gain trust. Their role is not to optimize performance, but to make economic outcomes intelligible enough to support rational decision making.

When participants know outcomes can be compared independently, incentives shift. Excessive intermediation becomes harder to justify. Clean supply paths become easier to defend. Value propositions built on confusion lose effectiveness.

This is not a call for radical disclosure or regulation. It is a recognition that efficient markets require shared reference systems, and that the open web currently lacks one for economic outcomes.

Progress will not come from a single standard or a single study. In the near term, advertisers will defend themselves through contracts and channel choices. Publishers will protect yield by collapsing distance to demand. Agencies will choose how they compete. Platforms will continue to shape behavior through enforcement and signals.

Longer term, economic confidence will require new infrastructure that allows buyers and sellers to understand enough to act rationally.

The work is difficult, but it is solvable. When incentives align around accountability rather than abstraction, programmatic media can deliver both efficiency and confidence.