Ben Hovaness is mid-sentence, hammering home how bid duplication’s bleeding the industry dry—$5 billion a year, folks—when it hits me: this isn’t new. We’ve been here before.
Zoom out. The Programmatic Governance Council, fresh off the IAB Tech Lab’s assembly line, is ad tech’s latest stab at harmony. Born from last year’s transaction ID brawls—LinkedIn comment sections turned gladiator arenas—they’re herding DSPs, SSPs, agencies, the whole dysfunctional family into rooms to hash out standards before the knives come out.
Hovaness, OMD Worldwide’s Chief Media Officer and the council’s ringmaster, isn’t mincing words. Early meetings? Productive, he claims. Top priority: bid duplication, that sneaky inefficiency where the same impression gets bid on multiple times, juicing costs without adding value.
Can the Programmatic Governance Council Actually End Bid Duplication?
Look, transaction IDs were the last big hope—track bids uniquely, right? Wrong. It’s one tool in a messy toolbox. Hovaness pushes multi-bidding: DSPs fire off multiple bids per request, smarter than SSPs spamming requests. Less waste. Sounds good. But here’s the kicker—it’s not a solo gig.
“The industry will need to lock arms and take the necessary steps to solve bid duplication together,” Hovaness told the pod. Lock arms? In ad tech? That’s like asking foxes to guard the henhouse while they negotiate salad rights.
I’ve seen this movie. Remember the early 2010s, when header bidding exploded? Everyone cheered ‘transparency!’ Then came the bid loss rates, latency nightmares, and oh yeah, that $4-6 billion in annual ‘tax’ no one could quite pin down. Bid duplication’s just the latest villain in the same script. The council’s unique insight? They’re admitting it’s $5 billion now—up from prior estimates—because fragmentation’s worse post-cookie crumble. Bold prediction: if they don’t mandate multi-bidding by Q3 2025, it’ll balloon to $7 billion as CTV programmatic surges.
One punchy fix won’t cut it. Incrementality measurement’s on the docket too—prove your ads actually work, or watch spend flee to Google and Meta’s walled gardens. ID bridging? Yeah, they’ll ‘responsibly’ match those identifiers, whatever that means in a privacy-panicked world.
Why Does Bid Duplication Cost Ad Tech $5 Billion a Year?
Simple math, cynical execution. SSP blasts a bid request. DSPs bid. But duplicates slip in—same impression, multiple auctions. Multiply by trillions of impressions. Boom: $5B evaporated.
Hovaness nails it:
“It’s in everyone’s best interest to cut out this part of the ad tech tax and move on to tackling the other ‘mischief’ that slips into the bidstream.”
Mischief. Love that. Euphemism for the scams, the latency hacks, the premium inventory that’s anything but. Who’s making money here? Not brands—they foot the bill. Not publishers, really, after rev-share. It’s the middlemen thriving on chaos, pocketing fees from inflated volume.
And agentic AI? Hovaness waves it off. Agencies might brief-to-campaign faster, sure. But ditch programmatic? Nah.
“It seems like you’re giving up the best thing about the ecosystem, which is addressability,” Hovaness says, predicting that AI will disrupt processes around programmatic more than the automation of programmatic itself.
Smart take. AI’s no baby-with-bathwater killer. It’ll optimize the bidstream, maybe even automate those council meetings. But addressability? That’s programmatic’s holy grail—scale without the platform stranglehold.
Here’s the thing. I’m skeptical. Twenty years in, I’ve watched ‘governance councils’ birth whitepapers that gather dust. IAB’s heart’s in the right place—post-flame-war peacekeeping’s noble—but execution’s where ad tech trips. Remember OpenRTB 3.0? Promised the moon, delivered meh. This council needs teeth: enforceable specs, audits, penalties for non-compliance. Otherwise, it’s just another PR spin to soothe LinkedIn warriors.
Historical parallel? Think W3C in the browser wars. Netscape vs. IE carnage ended when they standardized. Ad tech’s at that fork: unify or splinter further into DSP fiefdoms.
Short para. Big if.
What keeps me up? The money. $5B’s real—Hovaness’s estimate tracks with Digiday reports and IAB data. Fix it, and programmatic reclaims spend from performance max black boxes. Ignore it, and retail media eats your lunch.
Council’s early wins: cross-company dialogues without fists. Goals expanding organically—incrementality, IDs. Good signs. But lock arms? Prove it.
And AI lurking. Hovaness’s right—not replacing programmatic, but reshaping it. Imagine agentic bots negotiating bids in real-time, slashing duplication via predictive multi-bid. Utopia? Or just shifting the tax to compute costs?
Cynical me says watch the fine print. Who’s funding this council? IAB dues, sure, but vendor influence? Follow the dollars.
Wrapping the rant. Programmatic peacekeeping’s overdue. Hovaness seems legit—no buzzword bingo from him. If they deliver multi-bidding protocols by year’s end, color me impressed. Until then? I’m betting on half-measures.
🧬 Related Insights
- Read more: [Warning] Click-Chasing’s Deadly Trap for Publishers
- Read more: HubSpot Buries Inbound, Unleashes Unbound: Marketing’s AI Reckoning
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Programmatic Governance Council?
New IAB Tech Lab group led by OMD’s Ben Hovaness to resolve ad tech standards fights, starting with bid duplication.
How much does bid duplication cost the ad industry?
About $5 billion annually, per Hovaness—pure waste from duplicate auctions on the same impressions.
Will AI replace programmatic advertising?
No, says Hovaness; it’ll speed up processes around it but not kill addressability, the ecosystem’s core strength.
