As Audio Goes Programmatic, ANA Sees Growing Demand For Premium Supply.

Advertisers got more value from their programmatic spending during the first quarter. However, the Association of National Advertisers says a widening gap has emerged between marketers that actively manage media quality and those that do not.

The ANA’s latest Programmatic Transparency Benchmark shows efficiency rebounded after a weak fourth quarter, with gains driven by better viewability and delivery quality rather than lower supply-chain costs. Yet the report also concludes that the best advertisers are pulling further ahead as programmatic buying enters what the ANA describes as a more mature phase.

“The Q1 2026 Benchmark shows one clear trait: the best advertisers are getting better at extracting value from every dollar, while the lower-half commit too much spend into inventory that is not delivering value,” the report says.

At the center of the report is the ANA’s TrueAdSpend metric, which measures the percentage of ad spending that results in impressions that are measurable, viewable, fraud-free and not placed on made-for-advertising, or MFA, sites. After falling to 36.3% during Q4, TrueAdSpend rebounded to 43.3% in Q1. The ANA says the improvement was driven largely by a reduction in non-viewable impressions and an overall improvement in delivery quality.

But the recovery was not shared equally.

The top-performing half of advertisers converted 54% of their spending into what the ANA considers quality impressions, while the lower-performing half converted just 32.1%. That 21.9-point gap is wider than in previous quarters and reflects growing differences in how marketers manage inventory quality, measurement and supply paths.

What surprised ANA researchers is that the gap is not primarily being driven by transaction costs. Transaction costs were relatively similar between the two groups, differing by only 2.4%. Instead, the difference came from media productivity. The lower-performing advertisers lost 38.4% of spending to quality issues such as non-measurable and non-viewable inventory, while the top group lost just 19%. “The performance gap is a quality gap, not a transaction cost gap,” the report concludes.

The ANA also challenges a long-held assumption in digital advertising that higher quality inventory necessarily costs more. The benchmark found the top-performing advertisers actually paid lower average CPMs than their lower-performing counterparts. The higher-performing cohort paid an average CPM of $5.45 vs. $7.40 for the lower half, while also generating substantially more quality impressions.

The report says tighter supply footprints, stronger measurement coverage and better curation helped reduce waste that inflates effective advertising costs. Higher-performing advertisers worked with roughly half as many domains and apps as lower-performing buyers, concentrating spending on inventory that could be measured and verified.

For broadcasters and digital audio publishers increasingly participating in programmatic marketplaces, the findings offer a potentially encouraging signal. The ANA says advertisers continue shifting toward curated, transparent buying environments rather than broad open-marketplace purchases.

Private marketplace transactions accounted for 85% of programmatic spending during the first quarter, up from 79.2% in the fourth quarter. The report says advertisers are maintaining a strong preference for curated supply paths as they seek a balance between scale, quality and transparency.

The first quarter also brought welcome relief from the pricing pressures that characterized much of 2025. Overall CPMs declined to $4.42 from $5.55 in the fourth quarter, while the ANA’s TrueCPM metric — which measures the actual cost of quality impressions — dropped from $12.77 to $6.47. The report says the decline reflects a seasonal easing of demand and improved buying efficiency following higher rates of media inflation late last year.

One area moving in the wrong direction was MFA inventory. Exposure to made-for-advertising sites rose to 1.1% during the quarter, the first meaningful increase recorded by the benchmark. The ANA says the increase is a reminder that marketers must continue monitoring inventory quality as new forms of low-quality content emerge, including what the report refers to as AI-generated “slop.”