LONDON – The programmatic supply chain has become a tangled web, and holding companies are demanding help to cut through it.
That’s why Google Ad Manager is doubling down on its agency-facing partnerships, responding to growing pressure from major buyers who want closer relationships with premium publishers and clearer paths through an increasingly complex ecosystem.
“Over the last several years, we’ve had a lot of asks from the big holding cos, their agencies and some of the independents to further invest in our service layer that can help them to navigate what’s increasingly becoming a very complex and fragmented programmatic supply ecosystem,” said Paul Gubbins, CTV lead for agency activation EMEA at Google Ad Manager, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
The move marks a strategic shift for a platform that has traditionally operated as infrastructure rather than a service layer.
Buyer Direct tackles supply path optimization
The investment comes as supply path optimization has become a boardroom priority for agency groups seeking to eliminate wasteful intermediaries and establish more direct connections with publishers. Gubbins, a longtime SPO advocate who joined Google from PubMatic in 2025, said Buyer Direct, recently rolled out to Ad Manager, addresses this need head-on.
The tool merges the certainty of traditional insertion orders with programmatic guaranteed controls, allowing buyers to transact directly from a publisher’s ad server for the first time.
“We’ve seen a real trend from our buy-side partners in the DSPs that they’re using to transact CTV within deals, and specifically programmatic guaranteed deals and less in the open marketplace,” Gubbins said. “We’ve been thrilled with the early stage results and the ability of Buyer Direct to really address the needs of the holding cos specifically around their SPO strategies.”
AI-powered deals promise outcome-based buying
Google Ad Manager plans to give buyers greater control over deal construction through its “smart packages offering, which uses machine learning to build deals around specific performance metrics rather than traditional audience or inventory parameters.
Gubbins said the approach enables agencies to optimize for outcomes like click-through rate and viewability at scale. That reflects an industry movement away from impression-based buying, toward measurable business results.
“That’s enabling agencies and the DSPs that they use to start building out deals around the performance metrics that they’re looking to achieve,” Gubbins said. “It’s enabling the agencies to really start thinking about building more models around outcome-based buying at scale.”
CTV drives programmatic evolution
The changes arrive as connected television reshapes programmatic buying patterns. With U.S. programmatic digital display ad spending projected to approach $180 billion by 2025, CTV has emerged as a key growth driver, pushing advertisers toward more controlled transaction methods.
Google Ad Manager’s addition of agency services acknowledges that scale alone is not sufficient.
“We continue to invest in this agency-facing team to help our buy-side partners drive more demand through to the publishers that we represent on Google Ad Manager,” Gubbins said. The company’s bet is that becoming indispensable to agencies will ultimately benefit the publishers it serves.
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