Leak three: you bought through someone who won’t show you the invoice
ISBA and PwC conducted the most thorough study of the UK programmatic supply chain to date. They traced 1.3 billion impressions across 11 advertisers and 10 publishers, matching money going in with money arriving.
Publishers received 51% of advertiser spend.
About half the pound reaches the place your advertising appears. The rest is absorbed by the chain in between: demand-side fees, supply-side fees, data costs, technology costs, each individually defensible and collectively enormous.
ISBA / PwC study
- Reaches the publisher
- Absorbed by the chain in between
The direction of travel
- Unknown delta (money that could not be traced at all)
- Match rate
- Before
- Now
The unknown delta fell from 17% to 3%. Match rates rose from 12% to 58%.
We should be fair about the direction of travel, because the same study found real improvement. The “unknown delta”, money that simply could not be traced at all, fell from 17% to 3%. Match rates rose from 12% to 58%. Private marketplaces did better than the open exchange on almost every measure. The industry has genuinely cleaned up.
But the fee load did not go away, and the study’s data is now from 2022. It remains the most recent UK work of its kind, which is itself worth noticing: the last thorough audit of where your programmatic money goes is three years old.
The international picture is less flattering. The ANA’s Q2 2025 benchmark estimated $26.8bn in global media value lost annually to supply chain inefficiencies, with only 36.5% of spend reaching quality inventory.
The number that should decide your agency choice
Buried in the same ANA work is the most useful statistic in this entire article. Median exposure to made-for-advertising sites, the junk inventory built purely to harvest ad spend, has fallen to 0.8%, down from 15% two years earlier. Genuine, significant progress.
But the worst-performing quartile of marketers still put up to 28.7% of their spend into MFA domains.
Read those two numbers together. The waste is not evenly distributed across the market. It is concentrated, and it varies depending on who is doing the buying. Two advertisers with identical budgets, in the same quarter, buying the same category: one loses under a percent to junk inventory, the other loses more than a quarter of everything.
ANA Q2 2025 benchmark
The waste varies depending on who is doing the buying
Share of spend going to made-for-advertising (MFA) sites
Bars are drawn on a 0 to 100% scale.
That is not a technology problem. It is a procurement problem, and it is the single strongest argument for caring who holds the buying relationship. We wrote about the related version of this in search, in the black-box trap.
Our answer has been the same since 1999: buy directly from publishers wherever possible. Not because programmatic is worthless – it is governable, and it has its place – but because a direct relationship is the only arrangement where you can name every party that touched your money.
Five questions to ask any media buyer
Including us. Print this, take it into your next agency meeting, and pay more attention to how readily each answer comes than to the answer itself.
| Ask this | A good answer sounds like | Start worrying if you hear |
|---|---|---|
| 1Which publishers do you hold direct relationships with? | Named titles and named publishing houses, offered without hesitation | “We work with all the major publishers” |
| 2What share of my digital spend reaches the publisher? | A straight answer, or an honest “it depends on the route, and here is how we’d reduce the fee load” | Deflection to CPM or reach figures |
| 3How would you integrate my print, digital, and OOH channels into a single negotiation? | A specific mechanism, with an example of leverage used across two channels | Three separate plans presented in the same deck |
| 4What do you do about the 70% of viewable ads nobody looks at? | Environment selection, format choice, attention measurement | “We optimise for viewability” |
| 5With zero-click at 69.5%, how will you measure this? | An honest account of what can and cannot be attributed, plus what they’d track instead | A promise of full attribution |
The last two are the ones we would find hardest, and that is deliberate. Nobody has fully solved measurement in a zero-click market. An agency that claims otherwise is either not paying attention or is hoping you aren’t.
A note on the second question, since it is the one people find awkward to ask. You are entitled to know the fee structure of the chain your money passes through. If asking makes the room uncomfortable, that discomfort is the answer.
Budgets are rising, which makes the leak more expensive
UK marketing budgets went up again this year. The IPA’s Q2 2026 Bellwether recorded a net balance of +6.9%, the second-highest reading in two years: 23.8% of companies increased budgets, 16.9% cut them, and 59.4% held steady.
What makes that interesting is the mood underneath it. Over the same quarter, companies rated their own business prospects at −9.6% and the industry’s at −25.1%. Marketers are spending more while feeling considerably worse about it. That is not confidence. That is people who cannot afford for this year’s budget to be wasted.
IPA Bellwether, Q2 2026
Spending more while feeling considerably worse
UK marketing budgets
- Increased 23.8%
- Held steady 59.4%
- Cut 16.9%
Net balances
So where is the extra money going?
| Channel | Q2 2026 budget net balance | 2026 ad spend forecast |
|---|---|---|
| Video | +8.2%, a seven-quarter high | VOD +13.8%, the fastest-growing channel |
| Search | — | +10.2% |
| Online display | — | +8.4% |
| Other online | −5.1%, first decline in seven quarters | — |
| Out of home | −2.5% | — |
| Published brands | −8.3% | News brands −1.1%, magazines −1.7% |
We are not going to tell you that print and out-of-home are having a revival, because the numbers plainly show they are not. Budgets are moving out of both and into search, display and streaming.
We think that is backwards, and we want to be precise about why.
The effectiveness evidence in this article points to one thing: news brand environments deliver 40% more attention, multi-platform approaches deliver a 61% uplift, and out-of-home lifts search results by 129%. The money is moving the other way, into a supply chain where roughly half of each pound reaches the publisher and barely a third reaches quality inventory.
The mispricing
What works, and where the money goes
What works
Where the money goes
That gap between what works and where the money goes is a mispricing. And a mispricing is a buying opportunity, which is the honest explanation for something we say a lot and rarely justify: falling demand in a channel is exactly why rate-card negotiation works. We can buy print and out-of-home well in 2026, partly because we have done so since 1999 and partly because fewer people are competing for it.
The obvious objection: if this is such a good trade, why is everyone else doing the opposite? Mostly because they cannot get the price. Without direct publisher relationships, print and OOH are bought at rate card, and at rate card the arithmetic genuinely does not work. The channel isn’t the problem. The access is.
Where to start
If you take one thing from this, take the five questions above and use them – on your current agency, on your next pitch, on us.
If you want the version with your own numbers, we will audit your current media spend and show you what the same budget could buy. No obligation, and you keep the analysis either way.
Talk to us about auditing your media spendFrequently asked questions
What is the biggest risk to a UK media budget in 2026?
Buying channels in isolation. The waste rarely sits inside a single line of the plan – it accumulates in the gaps between separately negotiated channels, and in supply chains where roughly half of each pound reaches the publisher. A plan that looks efficient channel by channel can still be substantially wasteful overall.
Is programmatic advertising still worth it in 2026?
Yes, when you can govern it. Private marketplaces perform considerably better than the open exchange in terms of transparency, and industry-wide exposure to made-for-advertising junk has fallen sharply. But the ANA’s 2025 data shows that the worst quartile of advertisers are still putting up to 28.7% of their spend on MFA domains, so the outcome depends almost entirely on who is buying and how closely it is watched.
Does print advertising still work?
The effectiveness data says yes, and by a wider margin than most people expect. Peter Field’s IPA Databank analysis found news brands delivered an 88% uplift in profit growth across 2018–2022. The budget data says advertisers are cutting it anyway. Our view is that this makes print better value in 2026, not worse, provided you can buy it below rate card.
How does out-of-home support online performance?
It makes the online activity work harder. IPA Databank analysis covering 2014–2024 found OOH lifted search results by 129%, and eye-tracking research by Lumen for JCDecaux found people paid 52% more attention to a brand’s mobile advertising after OOH exposure. Treat it as a multiplier on digital rather than a separate awareness budget.
How should we measure campaigns when most searches end without a click?
Stop treating the landing page session as the only evidence of success. With 69.5% of UK searches ending without a click, click-based reporting systematically undercounts your marketing efforts, pushing teams to optimise away from what is working. Measure brand search volume, direct traffic, enquiry quality and assisted routes alongside clicks, and be honest about what genuinely cannot be attributed.
Do we need a full-service agency or an outsourced media-buying department?
If you already own the strategy and the brand, an outsourced buying desk is usually the better fit. You keep control of direction and gain the buying leverage, direct publisher access, and negotiated rates that would otherwise take decades to build in-house. We work that way with in-house marketing teams, and white-label alongside other agencies.
What should we look for when comparing UK media buying agencies?
Use a checklist, not testimonials. Ask which publishers they hold direct relationships with, what share of your spend reaches the publisher, how they connect channels in one negotiation, what they do about ads that pass viewability but are never seen, and how they will measure in a zero-click market. How readily each answer arrives tells you more than the answer.
Sources
Every figure in this article is linked to its origin. Where a trade body published the research, we have named the analyst behind it.
| Figure used | Source |
|---|---|
| UK ad spend above £50bn, channel forecasts | AA/WARC Expenditure Report, January 2026 |
| 51% of spend reaching publishers; unknown delta and match rates | ISBA / PwC Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency Study II, January 2023 |
| $26.8bn wasted, 36.5% reaching quality inventory, MFA exposure | ANA Q2 2025 Programmatic Transparency Benchmark |
| 70% of viewable ads not looked at | Lumen Research |
| 69.5% UK zero-click rate | SparkToro and Similarweb, June 2026 |
| 40% more attention, 12% market share growth, 32% action intent | Peter Field, Brand Metrics and Lumen, published by Newsworks, September 2025 |
| 61% multi-platform uplift, 88% profit growth uplift, 1.5x trust | Peter Field’s IPA Databank analysis, published by Newsworks |
| OOH search lift 129%, brand fame 89%, mobile attention 52%, 97% weekly reach | Peter Field’s IPA Databank analysis and Route 2025, published by Outsmart |
| UK marketing budget net balances and sentiment | IPA Bellwether Report, Q2 2026 |
A note on two of these. The ISBA figures come from 2022 fieldwork, still the most recent UK study of its kind, which is part of the point. The ANA data is global and US-weighted rather than UK-specific.
