A quarterly review of programmatic and display advertising — DSPs, SSPs, private marketplaces, CTV, and the auction underneath all of them. Written by practitioners who have unpicked more auction logs than the platforms would like.
The consensus, for four straight years, was that the open programmatic auction was terminal — that private marketplaces, direct deals, and walled-garden inventory would absorb the demand and leave the open web to bots and misinformation sites. In late 2025 the trend reversed, quietly, and for reasons the trade press has not quite figured out how to write about.
A UK financial-services brand's programmatic team pulled a full inventory audit. 38% of the previous year's spend had landed on made-for-advertising sites. The audit — and the reallocation.
A DTC retailer's connected-TV allocation, negotiated at premium CPMs against an underdeveloped audience-quality argument, produced returns that did not justify the ask. What the buyer learned.
A premium publisher-side PMP sold to seven brands turned out, on log-level review, to be re-selling the same inventory in the open exchange at 40% of the PMP CPM.
The rise of curated PMP structures, running against publisher-reviewed inventory pools, is the most substantive supply-side change in programmatic in five years. We think it deserves more attention than it has.
Every retail-media platform we have reviewed is currently running attribution models, viewability standards, and inventory disclosure practices that programmatic buyers spent a decade refusing to accept from open exchanges. We ask why.
The head of programmatic at a UK challenger bank walks through the six-month supply-path optimisation audit her team ran. Which SSPs made the cut, which did not, and the political cost of saying so publicly.
A mid-market DTC brand exited the open display auction in 2024 and has not returned. The programmatic lead explains why, what she replaced the spend with, and what she would say to a peer considering the same.
One data point from the previous month's auction. One thing we noticed in a client audit. One recommendation we would not, in a normal conference talk, have the space to defend. Free. Unsubscribe is one click.