The programmatic supply chain is foggy. On behalf of its marketer members, the ANA studied its inefficiencies and why it’s hard to see where a marketer’s dollar is going programmatically – and what the organization found isn’t pretty.
Of the estimated $88 billion programmatic ad market, 25% is “straight-up waste,” as our senior editor, James Hercher, puts it. $10 billion in advertiser dollars goes to made-for-advertising websites, and another $12 billion is wasted through inefficiencies in the ad tech market.
The latest report, released Tuesday, is a follow-up to ANA’s initial report on supply-chain transparency released in June. And if you’ve been listening to this podcast the past few weeks, you know transparency has been a hot topic. Three weeks ago, James covered TAG TrustNet’s initiative to grade DSPs and SSPs on their log-file transparency. And last week, he recounted the details from Adalytics’ report on the problems with Google Search Partners’ network.
It seems like every time industry organizations or consultants trawl for muck, they find it. Is there an end in sight? Or do the bottom crawlers just keep reproducing?
We do our best to answer this question in the first half of the podcast. Then, more optimistically, we discuss GroupM’s and Magna’s projections for ad spend in the year ahead.
In 2024, both groups are forecasting mid-single-digit growth in ad spend, a bit less than 2023. And within these forecasts, there’s one particularly juicy note. Retail media is rising, and so is streaming. With CTV’s fast growth set against linear TV’s accelerating decline, it’s now possible to see the point where linear TV’s and CTV’s ad spend will cross paths on a line graph. Call it streaming’s “A Star Is Born” moment.
