Adtech today feels like walking through a row of boutique coffee shops. Everyone claims their inventory is premium, their audiences handcrafted, their data single-origin. But just like with coffee, the label doesn’t guarantee the quality.
If buyers want to stop overpaying for rebranded commodity beans, they need to look deeper at the actual attributes that determine supply value. Below is a more honest, defensible framework buyers should use to evaluate supply premiumness; one built on quantifiable variables, not pitch-deck vocabulary.
1. Inventory scale: The Industry is starving for real reach
In programmatic, scale has been watered down to mean volume (big). But buyers don’t need big, they need relevant mass. True scale depends on how well supply maps to where users actually spend time, ie. coverage of the top apps or publishers, actual user volume and ad request depth (not inflated numbers), geographic reach aligned to campaign micromarkets, and crucially user dwell time or how long users actually stay in the environment. Premium scale shouldn’t be measured by abundance, but relevance.
2. Directness: SPO is still comically overcomplicated
We’ve normalized a supply chain where impressions hop through so many intermediaries that the path itself becomes the tax. Buyers should obsess over the share of directness vs. indirectness, the true QPS backbone of the partner (not the promised one), and whether fill rates indicate realistic win opportunities (at the clearing auction on the publisher end).
Inefficient supply paths drain budgets faster than fraud ever will but because they’re legitimate and go unquestioned. Calling something high-quality doesn’t matter if it takes a Rube Goldberg machine to reach it.
3. Placement quality: Engagement is the only premium
This is where the term premium gets abused most. The real markers of media quality aren’t slogans. They are:
- IVT rates measured by a widely adopted and credible solution
- Verifiable viewability or attention benchmarks
- Screen context and placement integrity
- High engagement metrics (click, view, or complete an action)
Placements that can check these boxes are the ones that consistently drive measurable attention from real humans. Bonus, speak to your partner and understand if they have stringent manual checks in place to cover for any system failures or augment automated checks.
If an exchange can’t surface these metrics transparently and consistently, premium is just a personality trait they assigned themselves.
4. Data strength: Signal density is the new scarcity
Signal quality is a scarcity, and that commands premium value.
The strength of supply should be defined by data fidelity. Buyers should scrutinize SDK quality (or specific integration quality) and its certification status (if it exists with operating platforms like Android or iOS), the richness or granularity of the signals (as an example, the percentage of content attributes in CTV bid stream), the completeness and accuracy of the bidstream, and importantly the ML and enrichment layers that convert the signals into actionable audiences or better bid predictability. Additionally, inspect to what extent the partner supports or provides visibility via reporting on these signals (on demand or otherwise).
Partners with the deepest, cleanest signal pool benefit from stronger brand trust.
5. Addressability: The hardest frontier and the real multiplier
Premiumness means nothing, if the supply underperforms. If performance collapses, the supply was never premium; it was simply built around ID availability. True high-quality supply maintains performance across addressable and non-addressable users, supports a spectrum of IDs (where consented and available), provides measurable attribution (deterministic, or probabilistic like SKAN) and demonstrates a minimal performance delta between ID-based and ID-less delivery.
Addressability is the stress test. Most supply fails it.
6. Transparency: Anything opaque is taxing you
Opaque supply chains hide margin extraction, quality decay and structural weaknesses. Buyers should insist on the basics like app-ads.txt, sellers.json, SupplyChain objects, but also price transparency, take-rate clarity, audience validation methodology, fraud certifications, viewability benchmarks and technical openness (open-source SDKs, IAB compliance, Prebid participation etc).
If a partner resists transparency, they’re not protecting IP, they’re likely protecting economics or flaws.
Agentic media buying will make quality non negotiable
We’re entering an era of agentic media buying where protocols like AdCP will likely enable AI agents to evaluate impression opportunities algorithmically. This will make impression-level data immutable for fully automated buying agents to verify supply-path integrity in real time, evaluate quality at the field level, detect signal decay, compare take rates algorithmically and enforce transparency as a bidding requirement.
Premium will no longer be something sellers can claim. It will be something buyers’ agents verify before bidding.
Premium is an equation, not a perception:
Value = fn{ Scale × Directness × Engagement × Data Strength × Addressability}
