Inefficiency is baked into the programmatic supply chain.
Between invalid traffic (IVT), bots, flawed targeting approaches that need to be adjusted midflight and ad tech taxes collected by middlemen along the way, brands spend a lot of money without seeing a return.
But AI can help cut out some of this programmatic waste, said Caroline Proto, director of global media at EssilorLuxottica.
The eyewear conglomerate has been testing a new self-serve buying tool called BlockVantage developed by Blockboard, a DSP that uses blockchain technology to verify ad impressions.
Over the summer, the tool helped EssilorLuxottica achieve a 14% lower average cost per store visit for its Sunglass Hut brand during a CTV and video campaign as compared to internal benchmarks.
Blocking IVT by default
The campaign was more efficient from the jump because Blockboard weeds out IVT before buyers even have an opportunity to bid on it, said Matt Wasserlauf, the company’s CEO.
Filtering out IVT pre-bid is rare in programmatic and can drive meaningful efficiency gains from the outset, Proto affirmed, particularly in video-based and CTV campaigns, where ad prices have exploded. It’s no wonder scammers have become more active in the CTV channel.
Invalid impressions and bots can make up a double-digit share of a campaign’s target audience, which brands find unacceptable. “Any risk of IVT is not something that we’re willing to be OK with,” Proto said.
Blockboard examines the usual data signals to weed out IVT, including looking at the user agent and IP address associated with an impression, as well as other proxy signals like device type, operating system and geolocation.
But the DSP also relies on digital smart contracts stored on an Ethereum-based blockchain. These contracts offer additional assurance that its programmatic partners aren’t including IVT in their audiences, Wasserlauf said.
The blockchain framework requires partners to meet certain predefined conditions in the smart contract – such as verifying that a human is behind each impression – before a campaign can run.
That setup addresses an issue the Media Rating Council identified earlier this year, whereby DSPs and SSPs could override a third-party verification vendor when it flags an impression as IVT pre-bid, Wasserlauf said.
Baking IVT filtration into the platform means advertisers can avoid having to pay IVT filtration fees to third-party verification providers like IAS and DoubleVerify, he said, and Blockboard also uses its own ad server, which reduces ad-serving costs paid to third parties.
Targeting efficiency
But IVT filtration is standard for all campaigns that run via Blockboard, so it’s not a distinguishing feature of the new self-serve platform.
BlockVantage differentiates itself by using AI to analyze audiences on a pre-bid basis and optimize performance based on the characteristics of each segment, said Proto, whose job involves juggling audience data across a variety of brands.
Proto oversees EssilorLuxottica’s brick-and-mortar retailer brands – Sunglass Hut, LensCrafters and Pearle Vision – as well as eyewear brands sold in those stores, including Ray-Ban and Oakley. EssilorLuxottica also manages manufacturing licenses for other brands, such as Prada and Ralph Lauren.
Each of these brands has its own target audience with its own unique characteristics, Proto said.
Blockboard’s self-serve platform lets Proto and her team optimize targeting for each of these individual audiences before they commit to spending any budget, she said.
To use the solution, an advertiser pastes a brand’s site URL into a chatbot interface. The AI scrapes the page and returns a list of recommended publishers, geos and device types, which can be further refined before a campaign is executed.
By contrast, programmatic buys through other platforms typically involve casting a wide net, then adjusting and optimizing within each tool once results start to come in.
But that approach leads to wasted impressions, Proto said, and leaves buyers dependent on platforms for transparent campaign insights.
“Pre-bid analysis before we’re serving our impressions has yielded significant foot traffic performance for us because we’re limiting our waste,” she said.
Proto also emphasized that pre-bid optimization is especially important for CTV, where platforms and publishers often don’t share the data advertisers need for post-bid optimization.
“CTV, historically, has been a verification black box, up until the last few years,” she said.
Spending budgets smarter
And given the current challenging economic climate, Proto added, it’s crucial for marketers to identify targeting efficiencies before allocating ad spend.
As the IAB has reported, some brands are cutting their marketing budgets due to ongoing economic uncertainty caused by the Trump administration’s constantly shifting tariff policy.
Because of that uncertainty, the consumer purchase cycle for luxury items like some of EssilorLuxottica’s brands has gotten longer, Proto said, hence the need to be smarter about spending.
In that sense, AI-based “easy buttons” like BlockVantage can simplify the process of moving budgets and making campaign adjustments on the fly, she said.
But while easy buttons offer convenience, Proto noted that “the industry as a whole is still figuring out the best way to use AI solutions.” And so, for now, the greatest immediate benefit of tools like BlockVantage is their ability to limit the number of ads served to IVT.
“When we’re in a period where budgets are down,” Proto said, “limiting our waste and making sure that every dollar we have is being spent against an actual human is imperative.”
