Duplicated reach: The media waste hiding in plain sight

You may see the same festive ad on your phone, then again while watching a video, and perhaps once more while browsing another platform. For the brand, each of those impressions costs money. But did every impression really add something new?

That is becoming a harder question for advertisers to ignore as festive competition pushes up digital CPMs. Brands are spending more to reach consumers as festive shopping picks up, but some of that spend can still be lost to fraud, low-quality inventory, repeated exposure and fragmented audiences. The issue, therefore, is not just how much brands are spending this festive season, but how much of that spend is actually reaching new consumers and delivering incremental value.

Festive ad kitty faces pressure from multiple fronts

The pressure is particularly visible across auction-led platforms, where advertisers are competing for increasingly fragmented audiences at a time when several categories are also trying to protect margins. Prabhvir Sahmey, CEO & Founder, Stratpulse Techlabs, a company specializing in marketing technology, said the current environment is less about a sudden rise in budget leakages and more about advertisers having limited room to distribute their spends. “Media spends have been stagnant over the past few months. Given the high concentration on large, auction-based platforms like Meta, Google and Amazon, very little is left to spend on other platforms,” he said.

“More than leakages, advertisers are trying to optimize for ROI, as margins for their products are under as much pressure as publishers’ revenues for the year or quarter,” Sahmey added.

The pressure is also playing out differently across categories. In FMCG, he said, growing reliance on quick commerce is leaving advertisers with little room to manoeuvre. Auto and electronics companies are investing heavily in content, events and influencer-based marketing, reducing their net digital advertising budgets. Telecom has limited new offerings to sell, while BFSI remains focused on outcome-based or performance marketing. E-commerce, meanwhile, is balancing investments across channels.

Fraud is only one part of the wastage problem

While ad fraud remains a visible concern during high-demand periods, industry voices point to another form of wastage that can be harder to identify: paying premium prices for impressions that do not add incremental value. Arjit Sachdeva, Co-founder, VDO.AI, describes the problem as a combination of “bad actors and bad architecture”.

As festive CPMs increase, the financial incentive for fraud also rises, he said, citing spoofed CTV inventory and data-centre traffic designed to imitate high-value shoppers.

But Sachdeva believes the bigger issue can be structural. “As inventory becomes crowded, advertisers end up paying peak rates for zero incremental return,” he said.

One example is repeated exposure to the same festive creative across TV, OTT and mobile. An impression may be technically valid and viewable, but if the same consumer has already seen the message several times, the advertiser may be paying for additional reach that is not incremental.

“That unmanaged frequency is where true capital leakage occurs,” Sachdeva added.

This makes the festive media efficiency conversation broader than fraud detection. It raises questions around how audiences are being deduplicated across platforms, how frequency is managed and whether advertisers can distinguish incremental reach from repeated exposure.

Fragmentation makes spillage harder to see

Audience fragmentation is another complicating factor. Sahmey argued that audience, creative and inventory quality, by themselves, cannot solve the problem of spillage. “Audiences are massively fragmented, and a handful of advertisers really use deep tracking or ad-serving technology to track duplication of audience engagement,” he said.

The challenge becomes more pronounced when relatively small budgets are spread across multiple platforms to reach a sizeable audience, while increasingly complex audience and location-targeting parameters add another layer of difficulty. “If you are buying through programmatic channels or ad networks, there is zero inventory differentiation. It’s just a function of compute power and response time,” Sahmey added.

Creative can still determine how effectively a message reaches different audiences, he added, but without ad-serving and tracking technology, advertisers may struggle to identify the extent of the spillage.

Sachdeva takes a different view, arguing that audience, inventory and creative need to be considered together rather than independently. “Spillage happens when the connection between the user, the environment, and the message breaks down,” he said.

He described inventory quality as the baseline for filtering out spoofed domains and artificial traffic. Audience relevance, meanwhile, should inform bidding decisions so that advertisers do not unnecessarily overexpose users or buy impressions outside their intended market.

Creative also needs to match the screen and environment where it appears, he added. “When you evaluate all three simultaneously, you stop buying raw volume and start buying actual business outcomes,” said Sachdeva.

Can wastage be stopped before the bid?

The bigger question for the industry is whether advertisers can identify potentially wasteful impressions before money is committed. Sahmey is sceptical about how widely this is currently possible. “Wastage can only be solved if advertisers know today how much is actually waste. Two out of 10 advertisers might have that answer,” he asserted.

That points to a basic measurement problem. Advertisers cannot necessarily optimise against wastage they cannot first quantify, particularly when exposure is fragmented across platforms and screens.

For IAS, a global media measurement and optimization platform, the answer increasingly lies in moving from retrospective measurement to pre-bid intervention. Saurabh Khattar, Country Manager, India at IAS, said the festive period is “the ultimate performance test for marketers” and that rising programmatic competition and CPMs leave “absolutely zero margin for media waste”. He identified several forms of low-quality exposure that can undermine media value, including sophisticated fraud, non-viewable impressions, ad clutter and Made-for-Advertising content.

According to IAS' 21st Media Quality Report, mobile web display accounted for 45.1% of global impressions but generated a disproportionate 71.9% of global MFA impressions, 71.5% of ad clutter and 55% of brand suitability failures, Khattar underscored.

He argued that this makes pre-bid optimisation an important first line of defence, allowing advertisers to filter out certain low-quality placements before an impression is purchased.

Post-bid verification still has a role, but combining it with pre-bid controls and supply-chain transparency can provide advertisers with greater visibility into where their money is going, according to Khattar.

The bigger question: what is actually waste?

The industry debate is therefore moving beyond whether an impression was delivered and towards whether it contributed incremental value. For Sachdeva, that means making quality assessment part of the bidding decision itself. “Relying strictly on post-campaign verification is essentially conducting an autopsy on lost budget, it confirms where your money was wasted, but it cannot recover the spend,” he said.

He argued that the next layer of ad-tech development lies in systems that can assess impression quality in milliseconds, before a bid is submitted.

Khattar similarly argues for linking verification signals to business outcomes such as conversions and sales, rather than treating media quality as a standalone compliance metric.

The underlying challenge, however, extends beyond any one technology.

Advertisers first need visibility into where waste is occurring, followed by the ability to act on that information before the media purchase is made. With festive budgets under pressure, the distinction between an impression that is merely delivered and one that creates incremental value is becoming increasingly important. For brands, that puts greater emphasis on understanding not just the price of an impression, but its quality, duplication and potential contribution to the campaign's broader business objective.