As digital marketers, we’ve spent the better part of two decades optimising for scale: more impressions, more reach, more spend. But the next phase of programmatic looks likely to be judged on something else – efficiency.
Efficiency is increasingly being driven by AI. In fact, the IAB UK describes AI as moving from experimentation into core infrastructure, shaping everything from media planning and forecasting through to automated bidding and optimisation. Almost half of respondents say that AI will be one of the most important forces shaping the sector over the next decade.
When campaigns run with that degree of automation, the quality of each bidding decision can start to count for more than the quantity of impressions bought – but only if those decisions are based on the right signals.
In this article, I want to look at four things: where programmatic waste actually comes from, why buyers are moving towards quality signals and contextual relevance, how precision bidding allows businesses of any size to compete, and crucially, what all of that means for publishers.
Where the waste actually sits
The ANA’s latest benchmark report puts working media efficiency at a record 45.1% of spend – up from 43.3% the previous quarter. But looked at from the other direction, more than half of every dollar entering the supply chain still fails to become a measurable, viewable, fraud-free impression in a quality advertising environment. Meanwhile, transaction costs rose to 27.2% over the same period, partly cancelling out the gains in impression quality.
The instinct is to blame infrastructure. What usually breaks first when performance marketing scales, though, is the decision-making rather than the plumbing. As volume grows, pacing slips, frequency capping loosens and bid efficiency degrades. The outcome is wasted budget, inconsistent delivery and declining ROAS, all while the technology itself performs exactly as designed.
Bidding logic remains an underappreciated source of inefficiency in the value chain. Programmatic is now a mature industry, yet bid decision quality is still too rarely treated as a first-order problem. That is understandable commercially, since quantity scales revenue more easily than quality does. But it also helps explain why so much money leaks out of campaigns that look healthy on a dashboard.
Why quality signals are winning
In our experience, automation has quietly changed what advertisers optimise towards. Algorithms tend to favour whatever is easiest to measure, which usually means the bottom of the funnel, and over time, that can pull budget away from the activity that makes conversion possible in the first place.
And the industry is alert to it. IAB UK research found that 56% of industry leaders rank AI and automation among their top three challenges, citing transparency, homogenised creative and over-reliance on algorithms.
The response to this has been a shift in the signals that inform a bid. Contextual fit, attention quality, engagement depth and post-click behaviour are all becoming increasingly useful inputs alongside raw reach. IAB’s State of Data 2026 research suggests the buy-side believes better AI-driven measurement could unlock $32 billion within one to two years, largely by cutting waste and connecting exposure to outcomes with more confidence.
Precision levels the field
Here is the part that should interest anyone without an enormous budget. TAG TrustNet’s benchmark data shows top-performing advertisers converting 54% of programmatic spend into qualified impressions, while lower-performing advertisers manage 32.1%. The 21.9-point gap is the widest the benchmark has recorded.
However, that gap has less to do with budget size than with how rigorously each buyer manages measurement, viewability, supply paths and price. A disciplined advertiser spending modestly can convert more of its money into working media than a much larger one running on autopilot.
The same principle applies to how bidding systems are built. When a platform is budget-agnostic, it does not favour advertisers simply because they can spend more. Rather than working to exhaust a daily budget, it identifies and bids on the opportunities that genuinely align with campaign goals. Smaller advertisers can then compete for the same quality traffic as far bigger brands, because the deciding factor is the relevance of the impression, rather than simply the depth of the pocket.
What it means for publishers
And of course, better bidding decisions on the buy-side are also good news for the sell-side, even though the mechanics sit elsewhere. When buyers concentrate spend on quality environments, they create fewer, better-paid impressions instead of cheaply bought, indiscriminate volume. Median MFA exposure has already fallen below 1% of spend, from 15% two years earlier, and private marketplace deals account for the large majority of programmatic trading. Both trends move money towards publishers with genuine audiences.
The flipside is higher expectations. Advertisers applying this level of scrutiny will want log-level data, clarity on supply paths and evidence that attention is real. Publishers who can provide it, and who keep viewability in good order, are well placed to argue for their share of a more selective market.
The next competitive advantage
Programmatic spent its first two decades chasing scale. The phase now taking shape will reward efficiency instead, and the four themes above point the same way. Waste sits not just in infrastructure, but in the quality of the decisions made within it. Quality signals are displacing raw volume. Precision can matter more than budget size when it comes to separating a strong campaign from a weak one. And publishers with real audiences stand to gain as buyers grow more selective.
The advertisers who come out ahead won’t automatically be those with the biggest media budgets. More often, they will be the ones making the smartest bidding decisions, one impression at a time.
About us
Preciso is a fast-growing adtech company, whose flagship Smart-Bid technology makes it easy for advertisers to launch successful programmatic campaigns easily and at scale.
Our Ultima native advertising solution creates personalised campaign creatives, and automatically embeds them within web pages to combat banner blindness and drive meaningful engagement at scale. It also uses customer journey modelling and AI to optimise the bidding and buying process in real time, ensuring only the most relevant ad placements are secured, boosting relevance and engagement, and minimising ad wastage and associated carbon emissions.
Founded in Italy by Piero Pavone in 2020, Preciso now has teams in seven countries. For more information, visit preciso.net.
