• by Joe Mandese , 3 hours ago

After years of progress eliminating waste in programmatic media buys, the Association of National Advertisers has added new benchmarks for brand safety and "suitability," including explicit risks to advertisers buying programmatic web and mobile ad inventory, as well as the sentiment associated with it.

The good news is that the ANA analysis found that 99.1% of programmatic inventory runs in "low risk" environments.

The bad news is that less than half (45.5%) the advertising buys are associated with "positive" brand sentiment, although the majority were "neutral" and only 1.6% were "negative."

The new benchmarks represent a high bar for brands tracking the safety and suitability of their programmatic ad buys going forward, and follow years of more bottom-line benchmarking associated with waste in the programmatic media supply chain.

The ANA's just-released "Q3 2025 Programmatic Transparency Benchmark" estimates that "working media" on web and mobile programmatic advertising buys has jumped from 36.0% in 2023 to 47.1% currently, which translates to a real dollar improvement of $13.6 billion to date.