For five years, Check My Ads has served as an independent watchdog in the digital advertising ecosystem. We identify the supply chain problems that cost advertisers money, siphon value from legitimate publishers, and fund harm. We publish our findings. We engage with ad tech providers, advertisers, publishers, agencies, and standards bodies to make the ecosystem cleaner and more accountable. We do this work openly, and we do it because the industry needs it.
We believe in programmatic advertising that works — for brands, for publishers, and for the public. That belief is the foundation of everything we do.
Recently, we have encountered situations that perfectly illustrate just how broken this system is.
Since March, we have been working to secure a seat on a mid-tier, independent DSP. They kindly agreed to waive our year-1 spend minimums, and after several discussions, we arrived at a countersigned MSA. We exchanged notes about how excited we were to get started.
Just before onboarding, things started to get a bit strange.
They told us they had questions. Would we bring them any supply issues we find, before taking them public? We said no problem.
Would their supply partners be extended the same courtesy? Yes, sure.
They told us how much they respect and value our work. How much it aligns to what their company is building toward. Transparency. Trust. Quality.
Then, they ghosted us for nearly a month.
When the DSP finally responded, it was to walk back their commitment. They decided they no longer would allow us to use their platform. They said they need to consider their downstream supply partners when deciding what advertisers to work with. Huh?
We have not named this partner in large part because we, unlike this DSP, stand by our commitments. But also, naming them would muddle the point.
This isn’t the only buy-side ad platform that has declined to work with us because of who we are and what we do (cc: Thrad). Despite many statements in trade press, marketing collateral, and sales pitches claiming their platforms are built with transparency at their cores, our experience with these platforms find these claims patently false. Somehow, these platforms suddenly do rigorous customer vetting…but only when a watchdog is the customer.
Why does Check My Ads want a seat on a DSP, anyway? There are a few good reasons. Firstly, and this may surprise many folks within the industry, but we’re an advertiser! We are seasoned digital marketers chasing return on ad spend just like any other brand. We’re also researchers who care about the future of publishers, and therefore, are interested in the tech stacks they rely on to make money. There is a dearth of research (academic and otherwise) that exists regarding programmatic advertising, especially when compared to the walled garden platforms. That’s mostly due to financial and technical barriers to entry for researchers. We believe in the power of an independent, open web – but we need hard data to evangelize that truth.
Lastly, we want to help small-to-medium size brands break free of the PMax and Advantage+ duopoly’s doom-loop. SMBs deserve choice and access to the open web to support publishers with their advertising budgets, and Check My Ads having a DSP seat for these brands to buy on would open up a whole new era in data-driven advertising. Not only for these brands, but for the real publishers losing on small business budgets to AI slop, and the independent adtech providers that stand to gain from these unlocked budgets.
It should be a win-win. So, when DSPs refuse to seat organizations whose work apparently threatens the opacity they depend on, that should raise some serious questions. Does the industry actually care about learning from the mistakes of its past? Why is sustaining the opacity worth losing out on incremental revenue? Who are they protecting? What are they trying to hide?
If you run a DSP and you are confident in your supply, we would love to hear from you
Thank you to AdExchanger for your reporting on this. For more, check out the article.