🚨 Spoiler alert: The petting zoo is closed. The wolves now run the restaurant. And guess who’s still on the menu?

At the Adtech Economic Forum this past week, Jonathan Roberts from Dotdash Meredith finally said the quiet part out loud. He wasn’t subtle, and frankly, he didn’t need to be.

Publishers have always been seen by #adtech as “herd animals — natural prey.”

The open web? It’s alive, sure, but much like a prizefighter in round twelve — still swinging but ready to drop. And while publishers stagger around waiting for adtech to patch it up, Roberts reminded everyone of the obvious:

Adtech won’t fix the open web for publishers.
They’ll fix it for themselves — and the publishers will get the bill.

For over a decade, publishers have played the same tragic role — the hardworking sheep in a system built by wolves, waiting to be "sheared." Only, it’s not just wool being taken anymore. It’s blood, sweat, and entire revenue streams.

Let’s break it down:

✅ You fund the newsrooms.
✅ You build and maintain the audiences.
✅ You take all the reputational risk.
✅ You foot the bills for journalism, hosting, UX, and content creation.

❌ Yet somehow, you walk away with the crumbs.

It’s not even a clever scam anymore — it’s institutionalized pickpocketing dressed up in buzzwords.

Middlemen have perfected the con, and publishers? Still showing up with that optimistic look, hoping for a fair cut this time, while adtech companies are sharpening knives behind the scenes.

Then came the next “big fix” for publisher woes — curation — dressed up in sequins and pitched in boardrooms like it’s the second coming of yield optimization. The promises sounded like something straight from a trade show fever dream:
👉 “Curation will unlock hidden value!”
👉 “It will finally clean up the spaghetti mess of the supply chain!”
👉 “It’ll return power (and dollars) to publishers!”

And yet, for most, the reality has been the same tired punchline: publishers got a pat on the head, a LinkedIn webinar invite, and a pocketful of lint.

Sure, there are a handful of savvy operators out there. Some publishers — the ones with real skin in the data game — are threading the needle. They’re leveraging first-party data, cutting bespoke deals, and building curation strategies with teeth. But here’s the thing:

The vast majority?
They have no clue what they’re even curating.

For every success story, there are dozens of publishers wandering around trying to “curate” inventory without understanding what that even means beyond a sales deck buzzword. Most are trapped inside yet another layer of programmatic fog, serving as unwilling extras in someone else’s revenue play.

As Ryan Pauley from Vox Media pointed out, even the big guys — the ones with in-house SSPs and robust data stacks — aren’t seeing anything close to the promised “lift.” If Vox, a veritable tech-enabled publishing fortress, can’t make it rain with curation, what chance does a smaller outlet or independent media brand have?

Meanwhile, the real winners? The same adtech middlemen who’ve pivoted from failed DMPs to self-proclaimed “curation specialists.” They’ve dusted off their suits, strutted into pitches like royalty, and are now soaking up advertiser budgets like it’s their last night in Vegas.

For publishers stuck on the outside looking in, it’s yet another reminder:
You built the show.
They’re still running the ticket booth.

Enter SPO, Supply Path Optimization — which, depending on who’s pitching it, is either a sleek efficiency engine or just another buzzword salad masking the same old grift.

The promise: clean up the clutter, reduce unnecessary hops, boost publisher take-rates.
The reality: fewer hops, same wolves.

Here’s the big dirty secret:
Even after years of SPO efforts, publishers are still losing 40% to 60% of every ad dollar. And when you get into the weeds, it’s worse.
One SSP? Caught keeping 98 cents on the dollar and acting like they were doing publishers a favor.

That’s not optimization.
That’s a mugging in broad daylight — but with a PowerPoint deck and a chiseled logo.

And yet, here we are. Another industry panel, another speaker promising that SPO 2.0 will somehow deliver the dream — “this time for real.”

Let’s play everyone's favorite game:
Adtech Buzzword Bingo.

✨ Transparency
✨ Synergy
✨ AI-powered, blockchain-fueled, privacy-first optimization

It’s like a conference room séance: close your eyes, chant the words, and hope no one notices the emperor isn’t just naked — he’s selling you the robe.

Transparency? Please. Publishers can barely see who’s even in the auction, let alone where their margins are going. “Privacy-first” means more opaque black-box solutions built to “protect” users while somehow still hoarding publisher data and leaving them holding the bill.

While the wolves fatten up, publishers have been in a downward spiral of desperation:
🔻 Jamming every page with more ad slots
🔻 Running pre-rolls, mid-rolls, and end-rolls until users rage quit
🔻 Embedding third-party trackers like it’s a clearance sale

All of this in a desperate attempt to recover lost margin.
The result?
An open web that looks like Times Square at 2 AM — blinking, bloated, and selling anything to survive.

Meanwhile, real journalism? Starved.
User trust? Evaporated.
Publisher revenue? Still stuck somewhere south of the bargain bin.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
Adtech isn’t broken.
It’s working exactly as designed — for adtech.

Middlemen have no incentive to fix this.
They’re too busy refilling their plates at the buffet, while publishers wander around wondering why the carving station only serves lamb — and guess who’s on the platter.

If publishers want to stop being the entrée, they’ll have to:
⚔️ Take back control of their data
⚔️ Rebuild direct brand relationships
⚔️ Break the addiction to third-party handouts

Otherwise?
The buffet’s still open.
The wolves are still hungry.
And publishers? Still walking around like it’s a petting zoo.

Dotdash Meredith's Chief Innovation Officer wants to end the codependency between publishers and adtech. His tool? Platform-scale intelligence—and a knack for breaking the mold.

For decades, publishers have played second fiddle in the programmatic symphony, reduced to bystanders while adtech intermediaries wrote the score. Jonathan Roberts, however, has other plans.
“When you’re reaching more people than almost any publisher—and in some cases, rivaling platform-level scale—you don’t need to just be a passive participant in someone else’s system,” Roberts said, reflecting on Dotdash Meredith’s unique position. “You can do more than just optimize yield; you can change the entire relationship.”

Roberts’ approach isn’t just about tinkering at the edges. It’s about rebuilding the publisher’s role from the inside out. At Dotdash Meredith—the largest print and digital publisher in the U.S.—he is orchestrating a transformation that’s positioning the company as a technology-first publisher.

Deciphering “Decipher”: The Publisher’s Answer to Adtech Fatigue
At the core of this effort is Decipher, an internally-built intelligence platform that Roberts says turns Dotdash Meredith’s scale and data into something closer to an independent adtech stack.
“Decipher was, on one level, what we’d always been doing—just artisanal,” Roberts explained. “We always knew which pieces of our sites worked for certain advertisers. Now, we’re doing that at scale with AI and machine learning.”

The company is sitting on mountains of first-party data gathered from tens of billions of visits across 40+ owned sites, from People and Investopedia to Real Simple and Travel + Leisure. But what Decipher does is more complex than simple contextual targeting. It links the dots between user intent, behavioral patterns, and topic clusters in a way Roberts believes most DSPs simply can’t.
“It’s not about keywords,” Roberts clarified. “It’s about understanding the deeper connections between topics and behaviors. Someone reading about mutual funds may also be planning a luxury vacation, or searching for high-end cookware on another property we own. Decipher finds those threads and activates them.”

It’s an audacious attempt to flip the script on adtech’s long-standing value proposition.

The AppNexus Brain Trust
To bring this vision to life, Roberts has tapped into a talent pool that has seen the other side of the curtain. He’s recruited a cadre of engineers and product leaders from the AppNexus diaspora, many of whom were integral to building the infrastructure still powering much of today’s programmatic ecosystem.
“These are people who built the pipes everyone’s using,” Roberts said. “Now they’re here building for the publisher side.”
Among them is Patrick McCarthy, a product veteran from AppNexus and prebid.org, and Sam Sajan, who built AppNexus’ bidder. Their deep-rooted knowledge of auction dynamics, bid shading, and supply-path optimization is now being repurposed to serve Dotdash Meredith directly.
“The idea is simple,” Roberts explained. “We know our content and our audience better than anyone else will ever know it. Why wouldn’t we own more of the process instead of outsourcing it to intermediaries?”

From Data Custodian to Market Maker
With Decipher, Dotdash Meredith can now offer advertisers hyper-targeted audiences based on proprietary insights—without needing to rely on third-party data providers or SSPs to do the heavy lifting. It also means they can cut inefficiencies out of the supply chain, putting them in a position to capture more direct media dollars.
“We’re looking at the entire auction landscape in real-time,” Roberts noted. “We can see inefficiencies that even the DSPs and SSPs might miss, because we have a bird’s-eye view of how the auctions interact across all our inventory.”

It’s this “God’s-eye view,” as Roberts calls it, that Dotdash Meredith believes can help marketers find under-leveraged inventory and audiences more effectively than current programmatic pathways allow.

A Timely Strategy Amid the Decline of Cookies
This reinvention is hitting the gas at just the right moment. With third-party cookies fading and regulators cracking down on data sharing, publishers with strong first-party assets are regaining leverage. Roberts’ play is emblematic of a broader trend: media companies bringing technology in-house and refusing to play the middleman’s game.
“Publishers are nervous about the next five years because it feels like things will happen to them,” Roberts said. “We’ve made a long-term commitment to making sure we’re the ones happening to things.”

In a programmatic world where fragmentation and inefficiencies are rampant, Roberts is betting that Dotdash Meredith’s ability to merge content, data, and delivery under one roof will give them a strategic advantage.

Beyond Average Answers: The AI Opportunity
Interestingly, Roberts isn’t just focused on monetization. He sees AI as a way to fundamentally reshape how publishers serve readers, too.
“For years, publishers have been giving the ‘best average answer’ to everyone. The problem is, average isn’t good enough anymore,” he said.
Rather than letting AI generate content—a tactic Roberts dismisses as counter to Dotdash Meredith’s commitment to expertise—he envisions AI as a tool to help surface more relevant next steps for users based on what they’re reading and where they’re headed.
“We know what people ask next. We’ve seen the path from curiosity to action play out billions of times,” Roberts said. “AI lets us connect those dots in real-time, personalizing the journey deeper than we could before.”

A Challenge to the Supply Chain
Roberts acknowledges that publishers won’t displace the entire adtech stack overnight, but his approach presents a credible challenge to the industry’s status quo.
“We’re not naïve,” he said. “We know how deeply entrenched certain platforms are. But we also know that publishers shouldn’t have to rely on opaque middlemen to extract value from their own audiences.”
As more premium publishers build out their own technology and reclaim their data, the question becomes: will platforms and intermediaries adapt, or will they find themselves edged out by the very companies they once commoditized?

For Roberts and Dotdash Meredith, the answer is already taking shape. “It’s about changing the expectations,” he concluded. “We’re not going to just sit here and let others determine how we capture value.”

Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More than You Did Yesterday.

Jean Fitzpatrick of IPG Media Brands isn’t here to sugarcoat it: “SPO is the only way to work right now.” Not one way, not a good idea, but the way. As if she's staring across the adtech wasteland wondering why some folks are still trying to MacGyver a winning campaign with duct tape and half a dozen unnecessary intermediaries.

“We have a traditional supply path optimization strategy where we’re really looking across the entire programmatic ecosystem,” she says. And by ‘looking,’ she means dissecting it like a high school frog, inspecting every SSP, every DSP, and every questionable connection that’s quietly siphoning dollars away from clients. “All formats that we’re buying, all SSPs we work with, and the demand sources from those SSPs,” Fitzpatrick rattles off. “We work with third-party resources to understand what the quality is there and what the connectivity is to the DSPs.”

In other words, if there’s a weak link in the chain, IPG is already sharpening the scissors.

But Fitzpatrick isn’t stopping with the classic SPO playbook; she’s flipping to the next chapter—what she calls the “post-SPO ecosystem” for CTV. “You don’t always need to be paying such a high technology cost,” she says, with the same energy as someone who just found out they’ve been tipping 30% on bad service. “We’re looking at ways to truncate the supply chain so we can deliver more efficiencies, better audiences, more fidelity.” That’s code for: we’re done fattening the wallets of middlemen who add no discernible value.

She points to tests with ClearLine and Magnite as proof. “We’ve seen a lot of scale and a lot of progress,” Fitzpatrick says. The kicker? Publishers are thrilled because “they know exactly who’s buying and what we’re buying.” Imagine that—clarity and trust. Two things the programmatic world has treated like urban legends.

Enter Jonathan Lieberman from Powers Interactive, who’s practically tattooed SPO across his knuckles. “We’re investing more heavily in supply path optimization,” he declares. No hedge, no qualifiers. “We’re getting more control of our publisher network, more control of our inventory pricing, our engagement.” And it’s not just spreadsheet talk. “We’re seeing better engagement, we’re seeing higher quality, we’re seeing all the things that we’re looking for with better investments in supply path optimization.”

In Lieberman’s world, SPO isn’t a quarterly initiative—it’s the fuel in the engine. “The reality is that audiences react to provocative messaging,” he says when discussing creative. “Quality is almost a second thought versus provocativeness.” But here’s the rub: no amount of spicy creative matters if your supply chain looks like a plate of spaghetti.

Lieberman and Fitzpatrick both agree: control is king. “For us, it’s a game of reach and frequency,” Lieberman says. “Have we reached every single person in our target audience?” And to do that efficiently, SPO has to be baked into the strategy, not sprinkled on top as an afterthought.

And then there’s the mic-drop moment from Lieberman on social: “It’s not social, I’ll tell you that right now. Social has been there, done that.” He describes Facebook as a burnout case—1% of revenue and 50% of headaches. “The juice ain’t worth the squeeze,” he deadpans. Instead, he’s doubling down on CTV and getting cozy with audio. “Audio is the most underutilized tactic in our space,” Lieberman adds, sounding equal parts frustrated and amused.

Meanwhile, Fitzpatrick is revamping how publisher data gets used at IPG. “We’re using publisher data in new ways all the time,” she says. It’s about combining first-party data overlays, smart direct buys, and “ingesting that through a programmatic guarantee or a bid request.” She’s dismantling the wall between buy and sell sides, turning what used to be an opaque game of telephone into something that actually resembles collaboration.

So, here’s the headline: Fitzpatrick and Lieberman are ripping the band-aid off a bloated programmatic system. They’re championing SPO not as some arcane best practice but as the ground rule for modern media buying. You can either streamline now or stay stuck overpaying for inventory someone else marked up three times before it got to you.

Their message? Get lean or get left behind.

Michael Olson over at Basis Technologies is pulling no punches. While the rest of the adtech world scrambles post-Adalytics, Basis is strutting in with receipts.

According to Olson, “Basis Technologies Log-Level Data (LLD) supports full page URLs—giving our customers the most detailed view of their media investments.” Translation? No more mystery meat in your media buys—you’ll know exactly where your ads land.

But wait, there’s more. Olson doubled down, saying “Basis is committed to being the most trusted and transparent independent DSP in the industry. Supporting full-page URLs is another step in setting our customers up for success.”

🚦 Full URLs =

🔥 Big Picture: Basis wants to be the DSP that doesn’t just talk a big transparency game—they’re putting it in writing and shipping it in the code.

Stay tuned—someone just cranked up the heat in the programmatic kitchen. 🍳

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