The SSP Circus: Now Featuring 100 VAST Tag Shenanigans Per Ad Slot

If you thought spam emails from a Nigerian prince were the pinnacle of digital desperation, let me introduce you to the world of CTV SSPs. These “supply side partners” (note the generous use of the word partners) have perfected the art of brute-forcing DSPs like teenagers hammering their way into a Wi-Fi router.

Here’s the SSP playbook 2025:

One single ad opportunity appears. Sensible people would, you know, offer it up once. But not our fearless SSP gang. Oh no. Instead, they gleefully blast the same DSP with the identical ad call up to 100 times per impression—each attempt sporting a slightly tweaked VAST tag macro like a con artist with a fake mustache collection.

Bundle ID? Change it.

Channel name? Swap it.

Genre? Call it Friends reruns, then TikTok knock-offs, then your Aunt Shirley’s home movies.

Device type? Xbox, Roku, toaster oven—it’s all fair game in this carnival of fraud.

The point? To “unlock” the DSP like some kind of ad-tech slot machine. The result? DSPs think these channels are desperate, label them invalid traffic, and shove their CPMs into the gutter. Congratulations, publishers—you just watched your $15 CPM sink to $3 faster than a SpringServe “optimization.”

And yes, I said Ad-tech genius’s SpringServe and other vendors of SaaS Tech. These are the platforms where the VAST tag gymnastics happen daily. Think of them as the circus tents where SSP clowns juggle macros in the hope of tricking a DSP into serving up premium ads. It’s like watching professional cheaters work together in a card game, but less charming and far more expensive.

Meanwhile, the so-called “partners” are sharing each other’s bundle IDs like a bad swingers’ club, flooding exchanges with recycled, mislabeled junk traffic. Publishers, platforms, and broadcasters—who naively trusted their “preferred SSP” with first-party data—are rewarded with the digital equivalent of being left holding the bar tab. Their bundles are deranked, their frequency caps maxed out, and the ads that do serve are slapped with a remnant label instead of premium. Translation: they get the scraps.

The tragedy here is that content studios and FAST broadcasters are being bled dry by the very intermediaries that claim to “maximize yield.” Instead, they’re maximizing their own compound commissions while destroying trust between advertisers and CTV.

Enter View TV, stage left, clutching a giant broom. With a cohort of O&O operators, they’ve built ONE SSP—a single, transparent, and secure link to demand. No daisy-chaining, no “ad call spam as a service,” just direct pipes to private marketplaces and self-service portals. Using the Secure Bundle ID system and a first-party SDK, they’ve finally built something brands and agencies can actually trust.

Because let’s face it: if the current SSP circus doesn’t end soon, advertisers may as well buy ad space on pizza boxes. At least the pizza box won’t try to trick them 100 different ways before admitting it’s a pizza box.

Check out ONE SSP at https://onessp.com