Ever since 19th Century retail marketer John Wannamaker's
"which half" quip, the ad industry has been transfixed by binary results, so it's not surprising that the just-released first quarter 2026 edition of the Association of National Advertisers'
quarterly "Programmatic Transparency Benchmark" reports has divided programmatic advertising ROI into a tale of two performance cohorts: the "lower half" and the "upper half."
Specifically, the analysis finds the performance gap is spreading between the two.
Utilizing the ANA's proprietary TrueAdSpend analytics metric, the Q1 report found a delta of 21.9 points
between the upper and lower half's programmatic advertising results: the upper half converted 54.0% of its programmatic ad spend into "qualified impressions;" while the lower half converted just
32.1%.
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programmatic performance is increasingly driven by the ability to actively manage quality, price, measurement, and curate supply at scale,” said Bob Liodice, CEO
of the ANA. “Higher-performing advertisers continue to convert spend more efficiently, while lower-performing advertisers are falling further behind.”
Importantly, the ANA found
that the differentiation had little do do with programmatic media-buying costs, and more to do with programmatic inventory "quality."
While transaction costs differed by just 2.4
percentage points between the upper and lower cohorts, "media productivity" losses differed by 19.4 percentage points.
"Programmatic performance is increasingly driven by the ability to actively
manage quality, price, measurement, and curate supply at scale,” ANA CEO Bob Liodice explains in a statement provided with the report, noting, “Higher-performing advertisers continue to
convert spend more efficiently, while lower-performing advertisers are falling further behind.”