When SSPs Start Playing Battering Ram with DSPs

In the great theatre of Connected TV (CTV) ad-tech, where acronyms outnumber actual ads, Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs) have officially moved from middlemen to middle-finger. Their latest trick? Brute-forcing DSPs like burglars at the back door of a nightclub.

The playbook is painfully simple: take one legitimate CTV ad opportunity and fling it at a Demand-Side Platform (DSP) not once, not twice—but up to 100 times. Each attempt dresses up the same impression with a different costume: a “new” bundle ID here, a “fresh” genre classification there, a magically morphed device type sprinkled in for flair. It’s VAST tag Mad Libs. And, as the logic goes, if you knock on the door 100 times, someone eventually has to answer. Even if the “house” you claim the ad is playing in doesn’t exist.

The result? A mess of misinformation data flooding DSPs, advertisers, and brands—who are left wondering whether their premium CTV ad just aired next to Breaking Bad reruns or a cat meme channel in a bar basement in Nebraska. Spoiler: they usually don’t know.

The Fallout of Q4 2024: When the Party Ended

Since the great Q4 2024 ad inventory cull, when the stream of “free money” in programmatic started drying up, SSPs have been scrambling like students who forgot their final exam was today. The volume of available ad supply with accurate data has collapsed to about a tenth of what it once was.

Instead of adding value, many SSPs are now simply taking their cut—sometimes as much as 25% of the downstream revenue—for the privilege of wrecking the trade. O&O broadcasters and FAST channel operators watch their CPMs collapse, their bundle IDs flagged as “invalid traffic,” and their ads demoted to the dreaded remnant status, all while trusting their “preferred” SSPs with their first-party data.

That’s not “partnership.” That’s Stockholm Syndrome.

Verification Theater: Humans vs. Reality

Let’s sprinkle in some comedy: ad-verification companies like Human and DoubleVerify are catching less than 20% of this garbage traffic. Meanwhile, View TV’s own Ad Exchange (ADX) reviewed a dozen platforms and 100 FAST channels, and flagged 92% of ad calls as invalid.

Yes, you read that correctly: nine out of ten “opportunities” were essentially SSP fan fiction. And hilariously, Loop Media—despite pushing bad trades—was still being signed off as “valid” traffic by Human. That’s like a nightclub bouncer waving through a guy with a ski mask and crowbar because he technically “had shoes on.”

Targeting? What Targeting?

Agencies are still spending premium budgets on DSPs to target hyper-specific audience demographics: 35-year-old dog lovers in Dallas who drive hybrid cars and watch cooking shows on Tuesdays. But when 90% of SSP-supplied data is nonsense, you might as well throw darts at a wall.

At this point, a simple run-of-network campaign punt is not only cheaper but has a better shot at delivering ROI. Why pay for “precision” when the rifle scope is glued to a funhouse mirror?

View TV’s Counterpunch: ONE SSP

Enter ONE SSP, built by View TV as an antidote to the nonsense. Instead of brute-force battering rams, it uses a secure bundle ID system and first-party data SDK to verify every request and delivery point. That’s 16 checkpoints of verification to make sure one device = one ad request = one impression.

It’s almost quaint—doing ad-trading the traditional way: request, bid, sell, deliver. Everyone wins: the advertiser, the DSP, the SSP, and—shock horror—the broadcaster who actually owns the audience.

How to Spot If You’re Being Brute-Forced

Here’s the fun part: you don’t need AI, blockchain, or a PhD in ad-tech to figure it out. Just do some math.

Take your hours watched, multiply by 24, and voilà—that’s your ballpark ad call volume. So when you’re an OOH network with 4,000 screens and you see 4 billion ad impressions a month instead of the 36 million it should be? Congratulations, you’re officially hosting an SSP crime scene.

And if your CPM is languishing at $5 instead of $15, just assume there are five SSPs daisy-chained between you and the advertiser, each skimming $2. Oh, and if your ad fill is under 10%? That’s VAST syntax manipulation choking your supply.

The Bottom Line

The solution isn’t more brute force; it’s more honesty. Stop hammering DSPs with fake combinations like some kind of digital locksmith. If your data is clean, your ads will flow.

And if you’d rather not play this circus game, View TV’s ONE SSP is the grown-up in the room. Full ad-break fills, smoother viewing, better revenues—the way TV has worked for decades, before everyone decided the acronym was more important than the ad.

Because at the end of the day, if your SSP strategy is “kick the door 100 times until someone gives up and opens it,” maybe you’re not a supply partner at all. Maybe you’re just noise.