Programmatic Advertising Part 2: SSP Trends, CTV Growth, and What Q1 Data Shows

In part two of their programmatic advertising series, Kelly and Sean shift from the demand side to the supply side, breaking down what SSPs are, how they function, and what the latest Q1 data says about where programmatic is heading.

They begin with a practical explanation of the supply-side platform: the technology publishers use to make ad inventory available to buyers in the programmatic marketplace. If DSPs help advertisers buy, SSPs help publishers sell. From there, the conversation moves into one of the more striking shifts in the market — the growing role of programmatic in connected TV.

Sean explains how streaming inventory has moved away from direct sales and toward a more automated buying model. Just a few years ago, only a minority of CTV dollars flowed programmatically. Today, many platforms are approaching a much more balanced split, and some are already heavily programmatic.

Kelly and Sean then zoom out to the broader Q1 picture. They discuss how programmatic growth has moderated from the very high levels seen a year ago, why that slowdown makes sense, and what factors are contributing to it — from market maturity to slower expansion in ad-supported streaming inventory.

The episode also touches on category-level changes, with pharmaceuticals standing out as a notable growth area, and closes with a look at the biggest DSP players globally, including DV360, Trade Desk, and Amazon.

Key topics include:

• What an SSP is and how it works
• The relationship between DSPs and SSPs
• Why CTV inventory is shifting toward programmatic
• The move from direct buying to automated buying in streaming
• What Q1 data says about global programmatic growth
• Why programmatic growth has slowed from prior highs
• Category-level changes, including pharma growth
• Market share shifts among major DSPs
• What to watch for in the rest of the year

Chapters

00:00 Intro and spring break recap
01:25 Why this is part two of the programmatic series
01:55 What an SSP is
04:32 Supply-side trends in programmatic
06:13 Why CTV is moving toward programmatic
08:56 Platform-level shift in streaming inventory
12:06 Q1 programmatic growth trends
14:19 Category changes in Q1
15:11 Major DSP market share shifts
16:16 Outlook for the rest of the year
17:49 Closing thoughts and what’s next

If you’d like access to the benchmark report or want to suggest a topic for the next part of the programmatic series, reach out to press@guideline.ai.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

You're listening to Media Monitor, where we break down what's happening in the media and the advertising industry and tell you what it actually means. Welcome back, Sean.

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Thanks. Hi, Kelly. How's it going?

SPEAKER_01 0:19

It's good. How did you have a nice spring break? I feel like people are finally rounding up the end of their time figuring out what to do with their kids or where to take them on vacation.

SPEAKER_00 0:29

I did, although I I may come across as a grumpy old man and say it felt like as soon as I came back from spring break, I'm now in summer. And I'm not loving it. It is very hot here, and I am not mentally prepared. I am not emotionally prepared. I'm just not prepared at all. And it's just it's simply too hot for me. So that's that's that's my take on coming back from spring break and c ending up right in the middle of summer.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Yeah, I feel like in the northeast there's always that fake out, and and you'll you all are in it right now.

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Yeah, I mean I think it by this weekend, uh where I live, the lows are gonna be back into like the twenty-five degree range. And for our uh uh I guess uh international listeners, probably negative like three Celsius. I'm I'm trying to be better about my Celsius Fahrenheit calculations, but sometimes that mental math trips me out.

SPEAKER_01 1:27

I'm right there with you. Well, I'm glad you're back. We missed you. And I thought what we could do this week is part two of our four-part series on pro the programmatic advertising ecosystem. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:41

So that's that sounds great. Who doesn't love programmatic?

SPEAKER_01 1:45

I mean, uh you know I do. So um we can um first, I think, you know, let's recap a little bit of what we've talked about. So in our first installment, we really walked through the fundamentals of a what is a DSP, a demand side platform, how does that work? And you know, if you you want to check that out, you can listen to our prior episode. But today, I thought maybe we would flip to the other side and talk about SSPs a little bit to kick us off. So the supply side platforms, you know, rather than you know, the DSPs being the tool that is used to buy, SSPs are the tool that publishers use to sell. And so we can walk through a little bit of how that works and our data shows. And then um the other thing that we can do today is speak a little bit to our Q1 um kind of analysis and um our data that we have. Um in our last episode, we talked about Q4, and so we've, you know, we can flip forward and see where we are. So um to kick us off, uh why don't you give us your SSP kind of overview with how that we see that flow into our data?

SPEAKER_00 2:54

Yeah, so way oversimplified, but kind of the DSP is from the demand side, right? The person who wants to buy the ad themselves, but the ad needs to come from somewhere. So in order for it to kind of flow through programmatically, there is a whole other universe of companies out there that are supply side. They are focused in on, to your point, working with publishers to aggregate what ads might be available to bid on. And they kind of collect them on their platforms and essentially act as this like ad aggregator so that when a DSP goes out and says, okay, I've got this bid, somebody wants to buy this display ad, is really targeting these audiences. Who has an ad for me? And the SSPs, over simplification, kind of then are able to surface that and say, I have these ads at the price point you wanted, kind of buy sell, what do you want? And so, you know, the whole job of the SSP is to kind of capture from a publisher perspective what ads are available, what they can bid on, and and you know, where are they located in terms of endpoint publishers? And so kind of the two work hand in hand in terms of literal supply and demand, probably intentional in terms of calling them those things to make it a bit simpler. But that's that's kind of what the SSP is slash does over simplification for the folks that are much more in the weeds on this.

SPEAKER_01 4:11

Yeah, but I think it's good that we start at that high level as we're going through this series. And you know, I did mention this is part two of a four-part series. So we'll walk through a couple other elements in future sessions. But I think what is interesting as we look at the supply side is where the trends are shifting, which ads are gaining, losing, you know, what publishers are emerging and how that's evolving. So talk to us a little bit about what you're seeing from a trends perspective and you know, maybe some surprises or um, you know, what you are noticing across this.

SPEAKER_00 4:48

Yeah. So kind of I'll take that into two parts. One, I'll address like the supply side trends and then talk to more high-level programmatic ones. But something that's sort of a special sauce uniqueness about our data is we can actually see not just the DSP in terms of where the dollar went, but in most cases, sorry, where the dollar was like, you know, went to first from a DSP perspective, we can actually follow the chain and see ultimately where it was placed. So from a supply side perspective, what ads were available, so we can see the actual publisher where the ad ran. And it's pretty cool because then you can have this kind of exact view of like, I can see both Trade Desk, DB360, Amazon's DSP, but I can also see how much of that went to Amazon Prime Video or Peacock or Hulu. Um and it's fairly unique in that we can kind of understand then and almost quantify, you know, all those big deals we hear about with partnerships, right? This DSP announces a new partnership with this company here, right? Functionally, we can kind of see that in terms of then how it plays out from a demand and supply perspective in our data. And what's super fascinating is the one really big area where I would, I was, I was generally surprised when I started digging into this like years ago, uh, and it has just accelerated, is the the CTV space, you know, the connected TV, what lands on your TV screen from like a streaming app perspective or in even some cases like a YouTube on TV. We saw a rapid shift away from direct dollars. So a direct dollar from our last episode, right, is like you talk to the company themselves and then you just work directly with that company to run an ad. That is something that has been wild.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

I oversimplified that in our um explanation, but I said, you know, instead of purchasing an ad on Sports Illustrated directly, you say, I want to target males 18 to 34. I don't care where the ad runs. Right. Like and so you're saying that people are moving away from from making those direct purchases on connected TV platforms to saying, hi programmatically, just get me the audience I'm looking to reach.

SPEAKER_00 6:56

Right. And again, maybe it's partly the foundation of of what you're trying to do in terms of like, well, I don't want a display ad. I want some sort of like video ad, but I want that experience of like someone is is actively sitting down and has this thing on a TV screen, right? It's a very different experience than like if I'm you know watching something on my my phone, or I'm like, you know, kind of just scrolling through social media, right? Different ad experience, et cetera. So there is some commonality, but I thought it was fascinating because as you move more to this like programmatic shift, um, it starts to commoditize the ad inventory, right? It becomes this price war of like, if I just want to find, to your point, women uh 18 to 39 in my, you know, uh potential, you know, demo, you know, profile of of people who buy my product, I might just say a bid and like I want something on TV so they can see my product XYZ really big and kind of have that viewing experience. But it treats then kind of all streamers the same, which I thought was interesting because I would say like there is different vibes to the streaming services today. And so like it is this interesting shift. But like to give you a real example, back in in just 2022, so not too far uh ago, where most of the streaming platforms had some sort of ad service uh in the United States, and a lot of them had started to roll out ads globally at that point. Umly about uh kind of like 30% of streaming out in the world was programmatic. So kind of one in, well not one in three, sorry, three in ten dollars was was programmatic. You fast forward, and again, we're just in Q1, so we have to kind of like see how this plays out. But by the end of this year, we're expecting almost a 50-50 split in terms of like programmatic versus direct in the C T V world.

SPEAKER_01 8:49

So if I have my math right and all things being equal, which they're probably not, that's a 5x growth, right? If it was 10% to 50%?

SPEAKER_00 8:58

Uh 30 to 50.

SPEAKER_01 9:00

Oh, 30 percent. Okay. So not five.

SPEAKER_00 9:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:04

That that's incredible. I mean, what a shift.

SPEAKER_00 9:08

In four years.

SPEAKER_01 9:10

And you're saying that we're seeing that kind of evenly across the platforms. It's it's not concentrated.

SPEAKER_00 9:17

Yeah, I mean, I would say things like uh Amazon Prime Video, um, YouTube, the fast services like the tubies, Pluto's over the world, those kind of started even off the offset of being very programmatically enabled. So we've kind of seen them mature in some cases for some of those services. Over 90% of the dollars are transacted programmatically at this point. So like those types of services tend to be pretty programmatic heavy. But even the likes of like uh like a Hulu or a Disney Plus or a Peacock are increasingly kind of approaching that 50-50 mark. Some less, some a tiny bit more, but like universally, there isn't really a standout that's like 0% kind of programmatic. And so there's there's an interesting shift towards there. And again, some are further along on the journey, but everyone is is on the same road.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

I was just having a conversation. I think we talked a little bit about just the overwhelming nature of how many services there are to subscribe to these days. Just having a conversation with a family friend who I was surprised to hear, she's a bit younger. She said, Yeah, I I subscribe to all these things. And I was like, How how are you paying for that? And she was like, Well, I get the ads. I mean, I'm not gonna pay for the no ads version. That's that would be crazy. So when you combine, and and you you said fast earlier for those who don't know that, the free ad-supported TV networks, right? So there's people that are more increasingly committed to getting the content and willing to watch the ads, plus these fast networks. I mean, this kind of is starting to make sense to me, right?

SPEAKER_00 10:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:51

That that is this is growing at that rate.

SPEAKER_00 10:54

Yeah, for sure. But yeah, on the point of the the ads, it's this huge differential for streaming services. If you subscribe to the top streaming services, let's say you want to watch you know the NFL live, so you had to kind of subscribe to multiple. If you didn't go ads, it would probably cost you about 115 bucks a month, which is like, okay, so a cable bill, but now I have to like log in individually to like a bunch of services and then log out, or not even log out, but like navigate back to the home screen and open up a new app, right? Whereas there is something that like if I'm paying the same price and I can just look at cable, I can kind of just flip the channels. Now the ad-supported services are a substantially alert. So you're talking around like maybe 60% of the cost if you did the same type of subscription. But yeah, it's it's uh a rapidly changing world that feels like I saw a meme years ago that I thought kind of fit in terms of all of the announcements around like, oh, we're offering ads now, we're offering ads now. And the commentary was like, this is just cable with more steps. And I agree. Like it's just like, okay, like we're kind of back to it.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

Uh yeah, everything, yeah, it's all cyclical. So that's a super interesting cut into um, you know, the supply side trends. Let's zoom back out because you know, we do have our Q1 report on programmatic, which uh quick plug, available for purchase, contact your sales rep. But um tell us what are we seeing? What are the themes that are emerging in Q1 that you want to call out?

SPEAKER_00 12:23

Yeah, I would say um kind of a slight bounce back globally after we saw a bit of slowdown in Q4. I think some of that bounce back has been really the benefit of the Olympics uh in terms of driving a lot of upward kind of mobility. You know, there's there's a few places where some of the streaming providers have allowed for Olympic inventory to be bid on. Uh and so I think that that has kind of naturally helped provide a little bump in the first quarter. Uh and again, compared to a slowdown. So kind of overall for programmatic, uh kind of roughly coming in around 7% up year over year. The other thing I should flag is is, you know, in talking with folks in the market, part of it was also it's just comping a monster Q1 of 2025. There was just so much growth that happened in 2025. You're talking, you know, mid 25% growth, 26% growth in Q1 of last year. Uh and so those numbers just aren't sustainable when you're talking about a you know multi-billion dollar industry. It's just hard to kind of get those, get those numbers that high quarter after quarter.

SPEAKER_01 13:27

What did we attribute what did we attribute the 25 growth to?

SPEAKER_00 13:31

For last year, it was really just like scaling rapidly. And a lot of it was was as particularly like streamers onboarded new users to the ad platforms. There just was more ads to bid on.

SPEAKER_01 13:42

Just more just more.

SPEAKER_00 13:45

And so like that's what helps fuel a lot of the growth. Now that kind of there hasn't been any major announcements and it's kind of the same players as last year, and they're starting to kind of all land in kind of similar monthly active user territory from a growth perspective, right? Maturing, maybe it's slow growth, but it's not like, hey, we added uh, you know, 100 million users in the last quarter, right? That's just not not the growth rate right now. So that's partly what we're seeing in in it. It's just there's there's not as much ad generation. And so as a result, uh there's not as much uh demand generation either. So it's it's kind of a both end on why Q1 of last year was so monster versus Q1 of this year as as growth, but much more tempered.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

Aaron Powell And what about at a kind of a category level? Is there anything you know that we're seeing ads, who are the decliners, who are the gainers?

SPEAKER_00 14:36

Yeah. So um overall from a programmatic perspective, one of the interesting ones that I would call out is we've seen a a big shift strategically for pharmaceutical clients. And again, that's going to be pretty US specific. You know, had historically hadn't really entered the bid stream because of all the complications of like where and what you can advertise. Um, but they've kind of shifted pretty big into the programmatic space, um, which I thought was was interesting um in terms of of growth that we've seen. And so that was that kind of was one that really stood out to me in terms of just like a big shift in the behavior.

SPEAKER_01 15:08

Um that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 15:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:11

And um, let's talk a little bit about like the major players. We know, you know, the the biggest DSPs. I feel like they're kind of like concentrated at the top end, and then we've got a bunch of long tails. So let's about what's happening across the largest DSPs and what you're seeing.

SPEAKER_00 15:27

Yeah. So from a market share perspective, globally, we've seen Google, particularly DB360, really start to kind of grow uh and expand. They're now around 41% market share in terms of what we can see, just for Q1 of this year. Uh, but they've kind of grown two, three points of market share every year since 2022. A trade desk is another one that really accelerated uh and kind of quickly climbed the ladder. Um, and then for the last couple of years, they've kind of just held steady. You know, they haven't lost, they haven't gained, but they they're kind of just rock solid globally uh in terms of just kind of right at that space. And then another big callout is Amazon. I think kind of no surprise given their conversations that we've heard in market of their aggressive push towards uh trying to kind of open up new partnerships, try to expand globally. Um, but they kind of were at 14% in 2022 from a market share perspective and right now hover just under 20 uh for Q1 of this year. Uh and we think that that a lot of that's paying off, right? In terms of their expansion upward and outward has kind of fueled a lot of the growth that we're seeing in our in our platform.

SPEAKER_01 16:30

Yeah, I mean that's pretty significant growth.

SPEAKER_00 16:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:33

For sure. Um so we talked about the categories, we talked about the major players. What are we thinking from an outlook perspective? Are is there anything that's catching your eye kind of in the go forward that you want to call out for our listeners to pay attention to?

SPEAKER_00 16:49

Yeah, I might be the only one making this call, but I would I would I would uh offer maybe a little bit of like hedge and hesitation. Uh I think the World Cup will drive a lot of bump, both in terms of programmatic and the overall marketplace. Um, but kind of based on our data, you know, we we are seeing a slowdown where we're not in the double digit growth that we've seen from the prior years. And we kind of saw this trend starting about midway through last year, right? This is not a new phenomenon, um, but we've kind of started to see this trickle. And right, I think it's a couple of things. It's a maybe advertising demand is softening a little bit. It's a there's just only so much ad inventory out there in the market. So programmatic can only expand so fast. Uh and there's obviously the the macroeconomic headwinds of kind of big consideration out there. So if you told me at the end of the year, at least in terms of the data that we could see, that programmatic would ultimately end up the year up like 7% uh for the next couple of quarters, I wouldn't be surprised at all. And again, that's that's kind of my take. I know that there's other folks that are calling for like close to 18, 20% growth, but like from everything that I can see and also like the chunk of data that we represent, I don't know how you get to those numbers with just kind of the slowing trends we're seeing across the board. But you know, I've been wrong before, so so we'll see.

SPEAKER_01 18:06

Well, uh my crystal ball tells me that you're good people and that it's gonna be a a long vibes, a long relationship, Sean. I can just I can see the future. I mean, it you you remember when I asked for 40 years of this podcast, and you gave me one. You gave me one.

SPEAKER_00 18:23

One and we are rapidly closing on that date. I know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:26

Well, part two of our programmatic series in the books. Stay tuned for the next two installments. And that's what we had for you today, everyone.

SPEAKER_00 18:37

That's great. And we'll be back next week talking sports. So look forward to it.

SPEAKER_01 18:41

Ooh, very excited to talk sports.

SPEAKER_00 18:43

Very exciting.

SPEAKER_01 18:45

All right, thanks, Sean.

SPEAKER_00 18:49

That's Media Monitor. Follow us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts every Wednesday for a new episode. And as always, thanks for listening.