The open internet is expanding well beyond the browser. CTV, retail media networks, mobile ecosystems, and digital audio have all become major engines for digital advertising growth. With that expansion has come a sharper, more urgent question: how well do we actually understand the path an impression takes across these environments?
For years, the supply chain grew faster than the industry’s ability to govern it. Layers of intermediaries appeared across web, video, and app environments, often without anyone stepping back to ask whether all of them were necessary or, more importantly, added value. The result was an ‘Accountability Gap’: brands couldn’t reliably trace where their ad dollars were going, publishers couldn’t see how their inventory was represented, and no one had a complete picture of who was responsible for what.
Now that economic pressure and brand scrutiny have reached new levels, the industry has begun confronting that gap head-on.
SPO Moves Beyond Cost and Into Trust
SPO used to be synonymous with efficiency — fewer hops, lower fees, cleaner routes. But the stakes have changed. Marketers are no longer optimizing for cheapness; they are optimizing for clarity, responsibility, and chain of custody. They want to know:
- Who is responsible for the inventory they buy?
- How accurate are the signals, labels, and environments being passed through the chain?
- What protections exist when something goes wrong?
Publishers, OEMs, app developers, and retailers want the same assurance in reverse. They want confidence that their environments are not being diluted, misrepresented, or repackaged by intermediate players.
SPO has evolved accordingly. It is no longer about shaving pennies off a path. It is about restoring trust and transparency in a system that grew too complex for its own good.
A New Wave of Brand Scrutiny
This shift is most visible in the actions of major advertisers. Procter & Gamble’s renewed examination of its ad tech relationships is one prominent example — but far from the only one. Brands like Bayer and others across the Fortune 100 are pushing for more direct supply contracts, impression-level transparency, and the ability to independently validate where their ads run.
Even with progress, fragmentation remains real. According to the ANA 2024 Programmatic Transparency Benchmark, advertisers still work with an average of 19 SSPs per campaign, despite major reductions in domain and app lists.
This reveals a critical challenge: quality varies wildly across environments, and advertisers are still stitching together disparate point solutions across environments to build the footprint they need. This tension between progress and fragmentation has intensified the call for cleaner, more intentional supply paths.
Directness Is Becoming the Defining Marker of Quality
Across all environments — web, app, and CTV — the industry is converging on one principle: proximity to the source is the strongest signal of quality.
Direct integrations (code-on-page, SDK-level connections, OEM-level access) are becoming the gold standard because they provide:
- Accurate environment validation (no spoofing, mislabeling, or repackaging)
- Accurate economics (clear fee transparency and fewer unknown intermediaries)
- Accurate signals and data fidelity (reliable identifiers, measurable consistency, verified device data)
This is especially true in CTV and retail media, where the market has struggled with mislabeled supply, variable taxonomy standards, and fraud schemes that look legitimate until traced back through multiple hops. Directness doesn’t just bring clarity — it meaningfully reduces risk for both buyers and sellers.
Where SPO Goes Next
The next phase of SPO will be defined less by cleanup and more by intelligence, value, and verification. As direct, authenticated connections become standard across the open internet, supply paths will evolve from manual “routes” into dynamic systems that optimize continuously based on quality, performance, and publisher-verified signals.
SPO is becoming infrastructure, not an initiative. It is how the industry will ensure accuracy, accountability, and performance are built into the buying path from the start — making media investments more predictable, consistent, and outcome-driven across the open internet.