By Mike Caprio, SVP, GM of Global Advertising, JWX
The ANA dropped a number recently that should stop every brand marketer cold: only 13% of advertisers contract directly with any SSPs, and just 60% are even aware of which SSPs are running their campaigns. The ANA calls it “information asymmetry.” I’d call it something more direct: brands have abdicated the selection of their own media, and most haven’t noticed the cost.
This isn’t an indictment of agencies or trading desks. It’s a structural habit the industry built together, comfortable enough for long enough that nobody was forced to revisit it. But the economics are sitting in your working media budget, quietly compounding — and the signal quality problem is sitting in your campaign performance, harder to see but just as real.
The Instacart Problem
Think about how you buy groceries. You could go directly to the manufacturer, but that’s not practical at scale. You could walk the store yourself and pick your own produce. Or you could hand your list to an Instacart shopper and trust them to make the right calls.
Programmatic buying works the same way. Publishers are the manufacturers. SSPs are the store. Your DSP and agency are the Instacart shopper, capable and convenient, but one degree removed from every decision that matters.
The problem isn’t that the shopper is bad at their job. It’s that when they’re picking your fruit, you can’t see the bruises. You don’t know if there was a better looking fruit left on the stand. Convenience has a cost. In grocery, it’s a service fee. In programmatic, it’s opacity, and opacity is where working media goes to disappear.
Proximity Is the Point
The dimension that doesn’t get enough attention in advertising is that every hop in the supply chain is a hop away from the consumer.
The partner closest to the moment of consumption — serving the ad at the point of playout, inside the content experience itself — carries the richest signal. This includes what the viewer watched, how long they stayed, and what they engaged with before and after your ad ran. That context doesn’t travel cleanly through three intermediary layers. It degrades, gets inferred, or disappears entirely.
Proximity to source therefore isn’t just a cost argument, it’s a performance argument. For display, the closest path means a top-tier SSP with direct publisher relationships. For high-impact formats, it’s the creative partner who owns the placement. For audio, the publisher landscape is concentrated so going direct is straightforward. For video, online and CTV, the closest path is the player itself. The entity serving the stream to the viewer sits on the most complete picture of that viewer’s attention. Everything else is downstream of that moment.
Choosing partners by proximity to the consumer isn’t a technical preference. It’s the most direct path to the signal that drives performance.
Where to Start: Three Steps, No New Budget Required
Supply path optimization is talked about like a major initiative, but many brands don’t respond accordingly. SPO never takes root because brands feel it’s too heavy of a lift, or because of their general apathy.
But advertisers don’t need to negotiate a new contract or onboard a new vendor. They can dictate the path directly within the DSP.
First, run a supply path report from your DSP or agency. This shows the media mix broken out by SSP and format. If an agency can’t produce this in 24 hours, that’s the first signal something needs to change.
Second, match each format to its closest direct path. Top-tier SSPs for standard display, creative partners for high-impact attention formats,the player for online video, SSAI or direct ad server for CTV, and direct for audio.
Third, run a POC before committing to anything structural. Once the path is set in the DSP, run a four to six week test and then measure quality, viewability, and CPM efficiency against your current baseline. The data will tell you whether to go deeper and it usually does.
Brands that take these steps see roughly 15% improvement in working media, meaningfully better transparency, and compounding signal clarity, meaning that each campaign informs the next with less noise in between.
The Instacart shopper isn’t going anywhere, and for plenty of use cases they’re the right call. But for the parts of a media plan where quality, transparency, and signal fidelity matter most, it’s worth knowing what you’d find if you walked the store yourself.
The freshest produce is always closest to the source.
