Are You Paying Big Mac Prices for Chicken Nugget Ads?

Most marketing leaders would not accept paying for a Big Mac and receiving a single chicken nugget. Yet according to Sameer Amin, VP of data-driven marketing and media at Reckitt, that is essentially the transaction happening across a significant portion of digital ad budgets today — brands paying full price for placements that are never fully delivered, viewable, or attributable to any real business outcome.

This is not a new problem. But in 2026, with programmatic pipes more complex and MarTech stacks more bloated than ever, the gap between what brands are buying and what they are actually getting has become a quiet budget crisis hiding in plain sight.

The Delivery Gap Nobody Wants to Audit

Reckitt’s public reckoning — shared by Amin on AdExchanger Talks — is significant not because the insight is novel, but because a VP at a consumer goods giant said it out loud. The digital advertising supply chain has layers of intermediaries, each taking a cut and each with their own definition of a successful impression. By the time a campaign clears DSP fees, SSP margins, ad verification costs, and brand safety filters, the working media percentage can drop dramatically from what was originally committed in the media plan.

For marketing teams in Southeast Asia, where programmatic infrastructure is maturing rapidly across markets like Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, this problem compounds. Local inventory quality varies wildly. Publisher-side ad stacks are inconsistent. And many regional brands are buying through regional arms of global platforms without the negotiating leverage to demand delivery transparency. The first audit question to ask your agency or platform partner: what percentage of gross spend is reaching working media, and how is that verified?

Publisher Monetisation Has a Performance Paradox

On the supply side, the publisher relationship with ad technology is equally fraught. VDO.AI’s extended partnership with SarkariResult.com — one of India’s highest-traffic education portals — illustrates the tension publishers navigate daily: grow ad revenue without degrading user experience or page performance. For four years, SarkariResult.com has used VDO.AI’s Native Video Player to thread that needle, embedding video ad units in a way that loads without punishing Core Web Vitals scores.

This matters for advertisers because publisher site health directly affects ad delivery quality. A slow-loading page means ads that render below the fold, autoplay videos that users scroll past, and impressions that technically fire but deliver zero cognitive impact. When you are evaluating publisher partners for programmatic buys — or direct deals — page performance benchmarks should sit alongside audience data in your evaluation criteria. In Southeast Asia, where median mobile connection speeds still vary significantly by market and mobile-first users are the default, a publisher with a bloated ad stack is not a neutral choice. It is an active drain on your campaign performance.

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Hyperlocal Thinking as a Media Buying Discipline

Bandit Running’s international expansion story, covered by Digiday, offers an unlikely but useful frame for how to think about ad budget accountability. The running apparel brand has grown by staying obsessively focused on core running communities — investing in depth of relationship within specific local audiences rather than spreading thin across broad reach buys. That discipline has compounded into international expansion with genuinely loyal customer bases.

The MarTech parallel is direct: brands that over-invest in reach without building measurement infrastructure to understand what is actually converting are doing the media equivalent of shouting into a stadium. The brands with tighter stacks — fewer platforms, clearer attribution logic, deeper integration between paid media data and CRM — tend to have a more accurate picture of where spend is working. For growth leads managing multi-market campaigns across Southeast Asia, the temptation to spray budget across every available platform is real. The smarter move is to pick two or three channels where you have genuine measurement confidence and optimise aggressively before expanding the footprint.

Building the Accountability Layer Into Your Stack

The practical implication across all three signals this week is the same: accountability infrastructure is not a reporting nice-to-have, it is a pre-condition for responsible ad spend. Concretely, that means three things.

First, instrument your media buys with independent verification — not just the platform’s own reporting. Tools like DoubleVerify or IAS provide a third-party view of viewability, fraud, and brand safety that should be baseline, not premium. Second, demand log-level data from your DSP partners. Aggregate dashboards hide the delivery gaps that Amin is describing. Third, define what a fully delivered impression actually means for your brand — is it 50% in-view for two seconds, or something more demanding? Set that standard contractually before the campaign runs, not after.

For teams running campaigns across Lazada, Shopee, or LINE’s ad products in Southeast Asia, the same principle applies: platform-native reporting is inherently optimistic. Build the habit of triangulating platform data against your own first-party signals — site traffic, conversion events, CRM intake — to calibrate how much of the reported delivery is translating into actual business impact.

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Key Takeaways

• Demand log-level delivery data from DSP partners and triangulate against first-party signals before trusting aggregate campaign reports.
• Evaluate publisher partners on page performance metrics alongside audience quality — slow-loading inventory is wasted spend before a single user sees your ad.
• Treat measurement infrastructure as a prerequisite for scaling ad budgets, not a capability you build after growth.

The uncomfortable question sitting under all of this: if most large brands have been running with a meaningful delivery gap for years without catching it, how confident are you in your current stack’s ability to even surface the problem? Better tools do not automatically mean better accountability — someone has to want to look.

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At grzzly, we work with marketing teams across Southeast Asia to audit what their stacks are actually delivering versus what they are paying for — and rebuild measurement infrastructure that makes the gaps visible before they become budget sinkholes. If any of this feels familiar, Let’s talk.