Thirty-six cents on the dollar

The Association of National Advertisers has been measuring where programmatic
money goes for several years now. The Q2 2025 benchmark puts $26.8 billion in global media value
lost each year to inefficiency. That is the headline. The detail underneath it is worse.

The efficiency index went backwards

The ANA’s TrueCPM index — the share of spend reaching quality inventory — sits at
36.5%, down from 37.8%. After several years of industry attention, supply
path optimisation programmes and a great deal of conference discussion, the number moved in the
wrong direction.

It is worth being careful about what that figure does and does not say. It is not a claim
that sixty-four cents is stolen. Intermediation costs something, and some of the gap is
legitimate service. But a system in which roughly a third of spend reaches the quality inventory
the buyer thought they were buying is a system with a design problem, not a discipline problem.

Made-for-advertising: a genuine win, unevenly distributed

The good news is real. Median exposure to made-for-advertising domains has fallen to
0.8% of spend, from 15% two years earlier. That is one of the more
effective pieces of collective action the industry has managed.

The bad news is in the distribution. Advertisers in the worst quartile still send as much as
28.7% of their spend to MFA domains. The median improved because the informed half of
the market got informed. The other half did not, and the median does not tell them so.

Private deals are not automatically the answer

Private deals average $7.15 CPM against $4.41 on the open exchange. That
premium buys curation, and often it is worth paying. But it is a premium paid for a promise about
inventory quality, not a measurement of it, and a private deal with a poorly curated seat is an
expensive way to buy the same problem.

Why we find this clarifying

If you are building advertising infrastructure now, this is the environment you are building
into. The industry’s own trade body publishes, annually, the finding that about a third of the
money lands where the buyer intended.

Our response has been to reduce the number of parties between the advertiser’s money and the
creator’s payment, and to make what is being bought legible before it is bought rather than
reconstructible afterwards. That is not a clever idea. It is the obvious one, and the reason it
is unusual is that it is difficult to retrofit.

Sources

• ANA Programmatic Transparency Benchmark, Q2 2025 — August 2025.