Skip to content
Request accessSign in

September 13, 2026 · Arjun

An advertiser trying to find out where the money went

This is an illustrative scenario, not a customer account. Our
platforms are in closed testing. The problem below is real and general; the handling is how we
would think about it.

The situation

A mid-sized advertiser runs a programmatic campaign through the usual chain. The reporting
shows impressions delivered and a cost per thousand. Their finance team asks a reasonable
question: of the amount we spent, how much reached a publisher?

Answering it turns out to require a project.

Why it is hard

Each intermediary reports its own leg. Fees are sometimes percentages, sometimes fixed,
sometimes embedded in the media cost and not separately disclosed. The same inventory is often
reachable by several paths at different prices. Reconciling the buyer’s figure with the publisher’s
figure is a manual exercise, and frequently they cannot be reconciled at all.

The ANA’s Q2 2025 benchmark puts the industry-wide efficiency index at 36.5%, down
from 37.8%, with $26.8 billion in global media value lost annually. Our advertiser
is not an outlier. They are the median.

The diagnosis

The problem is not that anyone is necessarily behaving badly. It is that the chain is long
enough that nobody holds the whole picture, and the reporting was designed per-leg rather than
end-to-end.

Adding a transparency layer on top of that chain does not fix it. It produces a better report
about the same structure.

How we would approach it

  1. Shorten the chain. Fewer parties between the money and the delivery means
    fewer legs to reconcile.
  2. Quote one all-in price before the campaign runs, so the question “what did
    this cost” is answered at the start rather than reconstructed at the end.
  3. Report what was delivered and verified, rather than what was purchased and
    assumed.

The honest trade-off: a single stated price means the advertiser cannot audit each leg,
because there are not legs to audit. Some buyers want the itemisation even when it is
unreconcilable. That is a legitimate preference, and it is not what we are building.

Sources