October 19
Every orchard has the same rule. You pick what you can reach from the ground before you fetch the ladder. The fruit on the lower branches is ripe, it is within reach, and it costs you nothing but attention. Climbing into the canopy comes later, once you know which trees are worth the effort.
The programmatic advertising community has spent the last two years arguing about where optimization should happen. The supply side has made a compelling pitch: curated marketplaces, deal IDs packaged by SSPs and curators, “premium” bundles promising quality at scale. The buy side still has the familiar tools most advertisers already use — the DSP, and the inclusion lists and optimization capabilities that sit inside it.
Our view, based on running optimization programs [IL1] with some of the largest advertisers in the market for the last three years, is simple. Start in the DSP. It delivers consistently better results, is quicker to implement and is far easier to run operationally. The SSP has a role, but it is the next rung on the ladder, not the first step.
Start with the fruit you can see
The starting point is measurement. You cannot pick the right fruit if you cannot see it. That means reconciling log-level DSP data with independent verification to establish what we call “TrueImpressions”: impressions that are fraud-free, measurable, viewable and not made-for-advertising. From there, we can derive “TrueCPM.” CPM and TrueCPM both start from the full ad spend. CPM divides it by every impression bought; TrueCPM divides it only by the TrueImpressions. The gap between the two is the money spent on impressions that failed to clear the quality bar. That is the waste, and it is the optimization opportunity.
Marketers have been calculating effective measures for years to better reflect performance: eCPM, an effective CPM that may incorporate revenue to measure efficiency, or vCPM, to get a sense of the viewable CPM. But when they rely on aggregates alone, they miss the critical detail. Knowing how many impressions were viewable and how many were fraud-free does not tell you which passed both checks. Nor does knowing how many failed tell you what they cost. Log-level data connects the quality checks and the price paid to each individual impression. You can see which passed the quality bar, and exactly how much was spent on those that did not. Knowing that puts better solutions within your reach.
The formula is quite simple. Group those impressions by domain, app and seller, then layer performance data on top, and something useful happens. You can see which domains, apps and sellers deliver quality at a fair price, and which quietly drain the budget. You can build an optimization model that ranks supply by TrueCPM and by outcomes, and turn it into an inclusion list: a plain, auditable list of where you want to buy, built on the price and unique quality profile of each individual impression, not just the aggregate figures. The work that we do for our many ANA Board Member clients is at precisely this fine of a grain. Best of all, we can do that work at a speed and scale that were not possible just a few years ago.
That list is easy to implement where the advertiser already controls the buying: in the DSP. No new contracts, no new intermediaries, no change to the trading desk’s workflow. The advertiser owns the list, sees every line of it, and can change it tomorrow — either manually or through simple APIs that update it regularly.
What the lower branches yield
The results are not marginal. For Tempur+Sealy, working with Empower — an A/B test that excluded roughly a third of low-quality supply — cut TrueCPM by 49.3% and CPA by 39.7%. For a major CPG brand working through IPG, inclusion lists built from their own TrueCPM data delivered 38.7% more TrueImpressions and a 27.9% lower TrueCPM over a five-month flight.
With Kimberly-Clark, we ran a controlled, in-campaign test that compared a DSP inclusion list with a curated SSP deal built on the same principles. In the head-to-head comparison, the DSP arm delivered 45.6% more TrueImpressions per dollar, while the curated deal delivered 22.5%. Both beat the control — but the fruit within reach of the ground yielded twice as much as the fruit on the ladder. We’ve since replicated similar results for other participants time and again.
The pattern is consistent: double-digit increases in TrueImpressions, lower CPMs and better outcomes. Quality is not a premium you pay for. When you stop buying the waste, it is a saving you make on the real cost of acquiring customers. That is one thing your CMO and CFO are both thirsty for: lower CPAs. In that context, CPM is merely a diagnostic.
Then fetch the ladder
None of this means the SSP has no part to play. Once the DSP optimization is in place, you know exactly what good looks like for your brand in the current moment: which publishers, which formats, which price points. That is the moment to then activate SSP curation — not to find quality from scratch, but to find more of what you’ve proven already works and scale it.
Used this way, curation becomes an extension of a strategy the advertiser already owns and has refined, rather than a black box they have to take on trust. The DSP validated inclusion list is the brief, and the curated deal is how you scale it.
The branch that needs watching
There is a concern, though, and the industry should say it plainly. SSP marketplaces and curation via deal IDs are the least transparent part of today’s supply chain, and they have become the new place where margin can be extracted at the advertiser’s expense.
A curated deal typically bundles supply, data and a curator fee into a single deal CPM. The buyer sees a price. What they rarely see is how much of that price reaches the publisher, how much the curator keeps, and how much the SSP takes on top. The industry spent years getting fee transparency into the DSP and the open auction. It is a strange and unwise outcome to rebuild the same opacity one step further down the chain, but that seems to be the direction of travel for an increasing number of marketers who perhaps don’t realize they are stepping outside the clean, well-lit environment they worked so hard to build for themselves within the DSP ecosystem.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with curators earning a margin. Curation can add real value, such as additional targeting parameters, and value deserves to be paid for. But advertisers can only judge that value if they can see it. Transparency over what the curator charges, and over what the curated supply actually delivers in TrueImpressions and outcomes, is what turns curation from a cost into an investment.
Harvest in the right order
The sequence matters. Measure first, with TrueCPM. Optimize in the DSP, where control and visibility already sit with the advertiser. Then use SSP curation to scale what works — and insist on seeing what it costs and how it compares to your baseline.
Pick the low-hanging fruit first. There is more of it than most advertisers realize.