Marketers appear to be making progress in squeezing waste out of programmatic media buying, reducing spending on “made for advertising” (MFA) sites and reducing the number of websites and mobile apps they buy from, according to a new benchmark report from the Association of National Advertisers.

The data suggests marketers may have squeezed $8 billion in waste out of the market. However, the share of media outlays that marketers spend on demand-side platform (DSP) services actually climbed a bit between studies the ANA released in 2023 and what the group is releasing today. That helped drive overall trading costs up by 0.8 percentage points to 29.8% of media spending.

And while the ANA documented the growing and widespread availability of log-level data from many players that marketers can use to audit what they buy, most of the biggest digital and social platforms still aren’t providing such detail.

“It is encouraging to see that more of marketers’ programmatic spend is reaching consumers,” ANA CEO Bob Liodice said in a statement. “However, there is additional room for improvement,” he said, including by leveraging the benchmark and framework identified in the ANA’s studies. The ANA Programmatic Transparency Benchmarking Study was launched earlier this year in cooperation with the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), in partnership with technology partner Fiducia.

The new report finds a 7.9 percentage point improvement in ad spending efficiency, though less than half of marketer spending in the study ultimately reached consumers. The gains came despite a slight uptick in trading costs and due mainly to eliminating waste—including spending on MFA sites.

Among the 21 advertisers providing data for the report, 43.9% of their spending reached consumers, up from only 36% in a study based on 2023 data.

Spending on MFA sites dropped dramatically between the two studies, from 15% of digital spending reported in 2023 to only 6.2% this year, with the median spend level among the advertisers a mere 1.1% vs. 10% the prior year.

Extrapolated across the $104 billion U.S. open web marketplace, the efficiency gains identified in the report represent roughly $8 billion in waste reduction. With one caveat: While 21 advertisers participated in both the 2023 and 2024 research, it wasn’t the same group of 21. So the progress could reflect, at least in part, a different mix of marketers.

The study covered $235 million in ad spending from April to September of 2024 vs. $123 million in prior ANA research from September 2022 to January 2023.

Marketers reduced the number of websites and apps they work with by nearly half, from 44,000 in the 2023 report to 22,634.

Plenty of work remains

There was less progress in other areas.

Marketers didn’t appear to be heeding prior ANA recommendations to reduce the number of supply-side platforms they work with, as the average number rose by one to 19. Using more SSPs can lead to increased costs, including bid duplication that can lead to breaches of marketer frequency caps.

The overall percentage of spending eaten up by transaction costs actually rose 0.8 percentage points to 29.8% of media outlays. The increase was entirely the result of increases in DSP platform costs and assorted DSP “additional costs,” which more than offset a decline in data costs. The share spent on SSPs remained flat at 13%.

Overall, combined DSP costs rose from 16% of spending in the 2023 study to 16.8% in 2024. That’s noteworthy on a couple of fronts.

First, it indicates ANA’s participants, perhaps because of their larger size and negotiating clout, get a better deal than the market generally, since those numbers are below the 20% take rate that The Trade Desk often cites to Wall Street.

Second, the 16.8% rate is still ahead of the 15% commission on media that was the legacy standard for compensation of ad agencies in the 1980s and ’90s, covering both media and creative services, before marketers began their long journey of using procurement to better manage marketing costs in recent decades.

The report notes that DSP take rates are lower in private marketplace (PMP) transactions where costs per thousand (CPMs) are higher.

CTV has the lowest DSP costs

And that’s particularly true in the priciest corner of the market, connected TV, where the report found 2024 CPMs averaged $12.90 overall and $15 in PMP deals. In CTV, DSP take rates averaged 8.8% overall and 8.9% in open marketplace deals—both well below the 16.8% for the broader market.

The ANA cited progress in more platforms providing log-level data to marketers, including Adlook, Equative, TripleLift, Viant and Yahoo. But there remain notable exceptions in a chart published by the ANA and TAG, including Amazon Advertising, Amazon Publisher Services, Google Ad Manager and Google’s owned properties, including YouTube. Google’s Display and Video 360 DSP did provide log-level data access and at least partial availability of required data fields, per the report.

Social and retail media platforms, including Microsoft (LinkedIn), Meta, Snap, TikTok, Pinterest, X and Walmart Connect were listed as “to be confirmed,” indicating they hadn’t yet provided log-level data. 

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CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly reported Omnicom Group and Horizon were also in the “to be confirmed” group; they were actually listed “not applicable,” as their certifications does not call for them to provide access to log-level data.