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Episode 175

The Media Quality Obsession

Ask media buyers what quality media means, and answers vary. Reach, brand safety, dwell time, exclusivity: nobody agrees, and that confusion is costing marketers real money.

This week, Elena, Angela, and Rob challenge the industry's obsession with premium placements. They argue quality really comes down to effectiveness: reaching real humans, in a context where the ad can do its job, at a price that makes the math work. They also unpack why Marketing Architects built its own DSP instead of relying on industry platforms, what to demand from media partners to protect against fraud, and how AI cuts both ways for junk inventory and creative quality.

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Topics Covered

• [01:00] Two studies on the industry's quality confusion and CTV fraud

• [02:00] A working definition: audience, context, and price

• [07:00] Whether premium placements really make creative work harder

• [08:00] The one non-negotiable floor: real humans seeing the ad

• [11:00] Why "everything works at zero" and cost drives TV performance

• [13:00] Why Marketing Architects built its own DSP

• [19:00] Using AI to fight junk inventory without lowering creative quality

Resources:

2026 eMarketer Article

2025 AdExchanger Article

Today's Hosts

Elena Jasper

Chief Marketing Officer

Rob DeMars

Chief Product Architect

Angela Voss

Chief Executive Officer

Transcript

Elena: I’m Elena Jasper. I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I’m joined by my co-host, Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects, and Rob DeMars, the chief product architect of Misfits & Machines.

Angela: Hey, guys!

Elena: We’re back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news, always trying to root our opinions in data, research, and what drives business results.

But I’m gonna kick us off quick with some research, and I couldn’t decide between two today, so we’re gonna cover both. The first is from “eMarketer,” and it’s titled “Media Buyers Struggle to Define Quality Inventory and It’s Costing Them.” This was written by Peter Allen Clark, and it covers a survey that “eMarketer” ran with Verve, and the big, sort of headline finding is that quality is almost impossible to pin down.

I wanted to start with the definition debate because that survey that we covered found that the industry really can’t even agree on what quality media means, and that feels like an important place to start. So why don’t we try? How would we define media quality?

Angela: I was thinking about this from the perspective of quality media. In my view, it reaches the right audience for the right marketing objective at a cost that makes the math work across both short and long term. That actually feels more complex than some of the definitions that I’ve heard.

Rob: I’m glad you and I are aligned on this one, Elena, ’cause I’m just gonna say it slightly differently, which is reach, brand-safe, dwell time, blah, blah, blah, right? Quality media is about media that reaches the right number of real humans, which is — you have to, like, even remember that part of it, right?

Elena: Yeah, I like that, both of your opinions. I agree. Like, is it being seen by a human? Can it do the right job? For example, an ad on television, you’re gonna have more time for things like brand building versus something like a display ad or a paid search ad. It just has a different job to do.

So sometimes a part of this debate is that if the outcome is good — like if the result is clean from your marketing and you’re seeing a return — you shouldn’t really care how you got to it. And I’m curious, Ange, how we feel about that.

Angela: I think direct-to-consumer brands might have a little bit of a leg up on something, maybe like QSR, where it’s a little harder to track some of this stuff. But I think the big question is: what results? If we’re saying if the results are there, should we be concerned? Because that’s often a measurement problem, right?

Elena: That’s a good point. If you’re confident in your measurement, measurement is actually a great way to judge your media quality, because if it’s providing a return you’re confident in, then it’s probably being seen by humans, and they’re probably seeing enough of it to respond to it.

Angela: Television specifically is a channel that we’ve talked about many times that provides both a short and a long outcome. And so if you’re a brand that can measure that short-term outcome, you should be measuring the short-term. It also is a channel that does an amazing job at building the long demand, and so we need to be measuring that as well.

Elena: Rob, one thing I wanted to ask you is, there’s a part of this debate that is around creative performance, and there’s a belief that a premium environment is going to make your creative work harder, so that’s why you should pay more for it and prioritize it and look for that sort of, quote-unquote, “quality.”

Rob: Wah, wah, wah. I’m into sound effects today. I don’t know why, but no. And I think we’ve talked about this in some capacity before on the podcast, but these fancy environments — do they sprinkle magic onto your ads and somehow make the story better? And all of that is just being done to justify high CPMs at the end of the day.

Elena: Yeah, I would consider that a very spicy, spicy opinion. But we agree.

However, is there still a quality bar that we think marketers should never go below?

Angela: Yeah, absolutely. I would say the floor is: fraud’s the floor. Bot traffic, spoof domains, these made-for-advertising sites — those are not a quality debate. They’re more of just a conversation around theft. You’re paying for something that doesn’t exist, so below that floor, you’re just burning money, and no measurement system really reduces you or rescues you, because there’s nothing real to measure there.

Elena: Yeah, definitely a big issue, but that’s where we were talking earlier about measurement and how important that is, and if you have proper measurement in place, that’s also gonna protect you from things like fraud in your media buys.

Rob: I mean, absolutely there’s a floor. It’s just not exactly what people think. To me, the floor is: was it a real human, and did they actually have a chance to see the ad?

Elena: Right. I don’t know why I found that funny. That’s true.

Rob: I find it funny too, right? I mean, it’s like, okay, we got all this fancy stuff. You can measure it down to a T. You didn’t actually reach a person, but hey, it looks good in a boardroom spreadsheet.

Elena: Yeah, sure does. So we’ve been repeating this view on the podcast for a while, that we believe everything works at zero.

Angela: I think we love our little mental shortcut phrases that we have around MA, and hope those seep into the industry as well. But when we say everything works at zero, it’s kind of our way of reiterating that cost matters a lot. We work in a channel like television where I think people think, “Oh, well, this is expensive, so it should be expensive.”

Elena: But CTV has changed things a little bit for TV advertisers ’cause it’s brought in more of those digital challenges, I would say. There’s been a lot recently — I see on LinkedIn and in industry articles — about how fraud can sneak into CTV, even direct CTV deals, that the AdExchanger article was talking about.

Angela: I think the article kind of points out something that the industry doesn’t really wanna admit, which is that going direct doesn’t protect you. Major media companies signing direct deals with advertisers can still quietly deliver that low-quality made-for-advertising junk or bot traffic right alongside the premium stuff, and that makes it really hard for advertisers to know what’s going on there.

Elena: So most marketers can’t build their own DSP. Well, they could, but maybe they can’t, and maybe they shouldn’t. So if I’m a marketer and I’m having to buy through industry solutions, what should I demand from my partners? How could I still try to protect my brand from some of that inventory?

Angela: Start with a test that we don’t usually think of as marketers. Ask your DSP to get a publisher on a call so you can ask them questions about their inventory. If the answer is no, or if it takes three weeks and six emails, that probably tells you how much transparency is actually available to you.

Elena: Having that extra check seems important.

So there’s a narrative now that AI is gonna make a lot of this junk inventory even worse. It’s gonna just become more prevalent. But it also, on the other hand, might be essential in building tools to catch these types of inventory. So how do you think marketers should think about using AI without it leading to low-quality media buys and low-quality creative?

Rob: I think we can agree AI did not invent junk inventory, right? It just really lowered the cost of making it. So there’s basically more of it thanks to AI, but the same speed is also the best defense we’ve got. The move isn’t to just fear AI — it’s to point it at the problem, really use it to detect the spoof domains, flag the weird traffic patterns, and pressure-test your creative before it ever runs.

Elena: I’d also say that when I see a bad — I’ve seen bad AI ads now on TV, like they’re starting to become more of a thing — they make me just as uncomfortable as a bad ad too. Like, a bad ad’s a bad ad.

Rob: I happen to sit on the side where I actually think AI can write incredibly well. I think it can produce amazing-quality video, but people love to pick on the bad examples, and I liken it to autonomous driving.

Elena: Yeah, agreed. And you’re right, people just have a much — they’re a lot pickier. They’re just harsher on AI-created work.

Rob: You’d be like, “Oh, it didn’t write any good headlines.” How many copywriters have you worked with where you’re like, “No, I’m sorry, keep going”? I mean, it’s just — we were like, “Oh, but the robot didn’t do a good job.”

Elena: Yeah, totally. Much harsher standard.

Angela: I think the thing that scares me the most is the automated bidding optimization towards kind of proxy metrics — so completion rates or viewability scores — because fraudulent inventory is very good at gaming those proxies. That’s kind of its entire business model. So the defense is to tie that optimization to outcomes that are hard to fake.

Elena: Yeah, so we’re having both performance and brand experience be helpful for clients.

All right, well, to wrap us up with something fun here: what is a premium version of something that you tried once and realized maybe it wasn’t exactly a scam, but it was definitely not worth it?

Angela: I had a Wagyu steak once at a high-end restaurant that was not worth it. It was really expensive, and I love steak. I haven’t even tried it again ’cause I was like, “You know what? I much prefer the ribeye off my husband’s Weber grill.”

Elena: Yeah, just not enough of a difference.

Angela: Yeah. Nope, nope, just wasn’t enough.

Elena: I’ve never tried that, but I get all my steaks well done, so I don’t think my husband would allow me to order a—

Angela: Oh my gosh, no.

Elena: —just destroy it.

Angela: But, like, how do I know it’s Wagyu? You could bring — I don’t — I’m not educated enough to be able to tell. So someone could bring me, I don’t know, probably a piece of pork, and I’d be—

Elena: Yeah. Like, it’s fine. It’s great.

Rob: I technically cannot tell the difference between my Keurig K-Cup coffee that I have every morning, my donut-shop coffee that I get at Costco, and a premium coffee. I’ll go into the coffee shop, it’s a great experience, but then I get that straight-up black coffee, and I’m like, “Ah, I don’t even know if I like it.”

Elena: Yeah, that’s a great one. I would say the same. I think you and I probably don’t have good taste in coffee, but I would say the same — it doesn’t make a difference to me. Some people are very particular, but yeah, I don’t have good taste. So for me, as long as it’s coffee, it’s fine.

Angela: I can tell the difference between, like, my church coffee — like when I go to church, and I don’t even know what they’re serving there, but it’s in this massive pot, right? And we don’t get ultra-premium, but we do get Starbucks — like, just ground coffee — and that’s just my go-to.

Elena: Yeah, that you can tell a little bit.

Angela: I’m like, “This doesn’t — this tastes more like mud than—”

Elena: Yeah.

Rob: What’s yours, Elena?

Elena: So we moved into our house a couple years ago, and now we’re better about this, but originally we fell for a door-to-door salesman. We just kinda felt bad, and he was selling premium pest control. It was, like, eco-friendly, and we didn’t have a pest problem, but he was like, “Oh, I see chiggers on your house.”

Rob: Oh, I don’t want a chigger.

Elena: No, I was like, “I don’t know, but I want that gone.” And it did nothing. Like, the bugs felt the exact same.

Angela: They’re always the one that shows up and goes, “I just got done with the Johnsons. You—”

Elena: Yeah,

Angela: “—just down the—” They’re just, like, seven — just far enough away that you’re like, “No, I—”

Elena: I don’t know who those people are. No, they literally said that. They’re like, “Oh, we do a lot of houses in this neighborhood,” and yeah, just… And I know all the Cialdini influence principles. I know all of them, but I’m still like — I still fall for it, so…

Angela: Yep, yep. They do work.