The 50 Cents Nobody Talks About

TL; DR

For every dollar spent on digital advertising, roughly 50 to 60 cents gets eaten by the supply chain before it reaches working media. You already know this, the ISBA/PwC study proved it, and not much has structurally changed since. What I haven't done is put every Alkimi offering in one place and shown how they connect. This is that edition:  the unified product breakdown, the full picture, and why the maths should bother you enough to have a conversation about it. Particularly now, with Q2 planning underway and H1 budgets under review.

I've written about supply chain transparency, about 100% Share of Screen, about carbon emissions in programmatic, about LLM search reshaping how consumers find brands  but always as individual topics woven into broader industry analysis. What I haven't done is laid it all out in one place.

This is the cheat sheet I wish I'd written six months ago. Every claim backed by live campaign data. Every number from real spend. And the self-awareness that yes, I work here, and yes, you should hold me to the same editorial standard I'd apply to anyone else.

The unified picture

Here's everything Alkimi offers, how it connects, and why the numbers look the way they do.

The core proposition

Alkimi gives advertisers more working media for every dollar they spend. The platform delivers 212% more media for the same spend (based on display and video campaigns across consumer electronics and financial services verticals, H2 2025). Cost per ad buy down from $9.03 to $2.71. A 47% fee reduction versus traditional exchanges. Proposals generated in 15 minutes using AI that reads full screen layouts, identifies every available placement simultaneously, and builds the buy in one pass.

And this isn't just about efficiency metrics on a spreadsheet. When more budget reaches working media, brand outcomes move with it. Polestar's connected TV campaigns through Alkimi delivered a 34% increase in sales intent and a 24% lift in brand association with "100% Electric" Nielsen-verified, not self-reported. 99% viewability. 96% video completion rate. Those aren't vanity numbers. Those are what happens when your ad actually reaches the screen instead of being eaten by intermediaries on the way there. 

These are averages across live campaigns ,  your results will depend on format, vertical, and spend level. That's exactly why we include measurement as standard rather than as an upsell. The numbers should hold up to scrutiny. If they don't for your specific case, we'll tell you.

The reason they work is structural, not magical: fewer intermediaries means fewer fees means more of your budget reaches actual media. It's not complicated. It's just maths that the rest of the industry has quietly agreed not to do.

100% Share of Screen & 100% Share of Voice

You've heard me bang on about this before, and I'm going to keep going because it's the product that changed how people think about us.

Every ad unit on a publisher's page shows your brand. Only your brand. No competitor noise. No clutter. Complete brand ownership across mobile, desktop, and CTV. Sold on a CPM, not a tenancy. Across premium publishers through a single activation.

If you're Fanta, sitting next to Orangina isn't the media strategy anyone signed off on. If you're a luxury brand, sharing a screen with a payday loan ad rather defeats the purpose of the creative your agency spent three months perfecting.

Partnership-style impact at programmatic speed. One activation. Total ownership.

The Alkimi Media Platform

This is the tech underneath that makes Share of Screen possible. Most programmatic platforms treat each ad impression as though it exists in total isolation blissfully unaware of what else is on the page. Ours reads entire screen layouts in real time, identifies every available ad placement simultaneously, and buys them together to maximise on-screen impact.

It's one of the very few technologies in the industry that evaluates what the human actually sees , the full page, not isolated slots. Which, when you think about it, is a startlingly low bar that most platforms haven't bothered to clear.

Premium Publisher Network

Global publishers including The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Bloomberg, Bauer Media, and News UK. Display, online video, and connected TV inventory.

Same premium inventory you'd access through any major exchange. Dramatically lower fees. None of the hidden margin that everyone pretends doesn't exist.

Scroller Tip: 100% Share of Screen without 100% Share of Voice is just a bigger box. Add both together and you move from interruption to immersion. The difference between your ad existing on a page and your brand owning the moment.

The measurement layer

This is where it gets interesting, because most platforms charge extra for the bit that proves the product works. Which has always struck me as a peculiar business model.

LLM Search Lift Study

I've written about the shift to AI-driven search before — 35% of the US population using generative AI, 60% of Google searches ending without a click, Gartner predicting a 25% decline in search engine traffic by 2026.

What I haven't emphasised enough is that we actually measure this. We track exactly how your brand appears in AI-generated responses, benchmark you against up to five competitors, and provide actionable recommendations. Google Trends for the post-Google era.

Every brand will need this eventually. The ones doing it now have a head start. The ones who aren't are hoping the problem goes away, which — spoiler — it won't.

Brand Uplift Studies

Included within minimum spend. Five key questions. Benchmarked against competitors. No additional cost. We include it because we're confident in the results.

Green Ads & Carbon Calculator

Here's one that nobody mentions at Cannes but everyone will have to answer for eventually — and with ESG reporting deadlines tightening, "eventually" is looking a lot like this year.

The carbon footprint of digital advertising is projected to reach 4.6 million tons of CO₂ equivalent. Made-for-advertising websites emit 26% more CO₂ than legitimate sites, with some emitting 65 times more.

Alkimi is the greenest solution in the market. Not because we've bolted on a carbon offset programme and stuck a leaf emoji on the website. Because our infrastructure is fundamentally leaner — fewer intermediaries means fewer servers, fewer data transfers, and dramatically less energy per impression. Sustainable by architecture, not by press release.

The carbon calculator aligns with the Global Media Sustainability Framework. Third-party verified. Partners have already measured and compared  the reduction versus traditional programmatic.

If your business has ESG commitments and your media buying doesn't reflect them, someone on the board is going to notice. Probably at the most inconvenient possible moment.

Scroller Tip: If your sustainability report says "committed to reducing carbon" but your media plan runs through 10 intermediaries per impression, you don't have a sustainability strategy. You have a sustainability aspiration. There's a difference.

The results

The common thread is always the same: when your brand owns the screen and more of your budget reaches working media, performance improves. Every single time.

Take Polestar. Their CTV campaign didn't just hit media efficiency targets,it shifted actual purchase behaviour. Brand awareness grew 12%. Preference shifted 20 points in Polestar's favour versus the leading competitor. Sales intent climbed 34%. And site traffic increased 12%, all verified independently by Nielsen through a Brand Uplift Study. When the supply chain isn't siphoning off half your budget before a single viewer sees the ad, the creative gets a chance to do what it was designed to do. 

Ripple. AWS. TikTok. Kraken. Agency partners including Publicis, GroupM, and IPG. Premium publishers globally. The pattern holds across every vertical and format we've run.

Why now

Three things are converging, and they're landing right in the middle of Q2 planning:

Budgets are under a microscope. Every CMO is being asked to do more with less. H1 reviews are happening now. When the platform delivers more working media for the same spend, the conversation tends to get a second meeting.

AI is rewriting the playbook. Agentic AI  systems that don't just analyse but act  is the most significant shift in programmatic since real-time bidding. 

Transparency has left the nice-to-have column. Cookie deprecation, privacy regulation, supply chain scrutiny, ESG reporting deadlines. The brands investing in transparent, auditable, sustainable media buying today have a structural advantage. The ones that don't will spend the next five years explaining to procurement why they can't account for half their media spend.

What a test actually looks like

Because "let's have a conversation" is vague and I'd rather be specific.

A typical pilot runs three to four weeks. Minimum spend depends on format and scale, but it's designed to be a test budget, not a leap of faith. You can run Alkimi alongside your existing stack: this isn't a rip-and-replace. It's a comparison.

We define success metrics upfront: working media percentage, cost efficiency, brand uplift, carbon reduction, whatever matters most to your team. At the end of the pilot, you'll have a side-by-side comparison with hard numbers. If the maths works, brilliant. If it doesn't, we'll tell you and you'll have lost nothing but a few weeks of test budget.

The point is to make saying yes feel small and reversible. Because the data does the convincing, not the pitch.

Reach out to lauren@alkimi.org or marco@alkimi.org, and they can help you further. 

The ask

If you're spending six or seven figures on digital media and you've never seen a full breakdown of how much of that actually reaches working media that should bother you. It would bother you in literally any other budget line.

Not asking for a commitment. Asking for a pilot. We'll run the numbers on your current supply chain costs versus what they'd look like through Alkimi. Reach out to the team at alkimi.org. Or just reply to this:  I read everything.

The problem (which you already know, but bear with me) I am ending this with the problem because this has been talked about in the programmatic circle for eons but incase you would like to read it again, it is here. 

When ISBA and PwC published their landmark programmatic supply chain study, they found that only about half of advertiser spend at the premium end of the market was reaching publishers. 15% of spend couldn't be attributed at all to the now-infamous "unknown delta." The follow-up study in 2022 improved that delta to 3% at the premium end, and publisher share rose to 65%. Progress, genuinely.

But here's the thing: those improvements were at the premium end, with the most cooperative vendors, in a controlled study environment. PwC themselves noted the results represent what the industry "should aspire to, rather than what is generally happening." For the long tail of programmatic, where most spend actually lives, the picture hasn't changed as dramatically as the headlines suggest.

Six to ten intermediaries still clip a fee on every impression. The technology tax , exchanges, SSPs, verification vendors, data providers still eats through a significant chunk before a single human being has seen your ad. For a $750 billion industry, that's still an extraordinary amount of money spent on plumbing rather than outcomes.

You know this. Every head of programmatic reading knows this. And yet switching feels harder than the cost of staying right up until procurement starts asking questions, which, if your Q2 reviews look anything like the conversations I've been having, is happening now.

Stay curious, stay critical, and for the love of all that's holy, audit your supply chain before your CFO does it for you.

P.S. - Yes, I've just written a unified product piece in a blog that prides itself on editorial independence. But every number in here is from live campaigns, and I'd rather you had the full picture from someone who'll also tell you when the industry's talking rubbish than piece it together from six different sales decks. Normal service resumes next fortnight.

P.P.S. - If you read all of this and your first thought was "but we've always done it this way" that's the exact sentence that has cost this industry billions in working media dollars. Just saying.