How AdTech's Efficiency Drive Often Overlooks Valuable Niche Audiences

The tension between scale and quality was a running theme at 2025 industry events like Advertising Week and the Cannes Lions festival. Brands face persistent hurdles in audience targeting just as consumers are demanding more meaningful engagement. The focus on efficiency and scale creates a costly trade-off as ad-buying systems often overlook smaller, but high-quality publishers, leaving highly engaged and valuable audiences behind.

To find the right balance, we spoke with Alexis Hochleutner, an AdTech expert and founder of the consultancy ARC Dig IO. She leverages her previous experience at Google, Facebook, and Amazon to tackle the ecosystem's biggest challenges. Hochleutner explains how an industry-wide focus on cost-cutting and flawed metrics can lead many brands to overlook their most passionate communities. "A lot of these efficiency plays, where you're just cutting costs, mean you can no longer reach these highly engaged audiences in the places where they feel most understood. So you end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater," she says.

• Hop off: The problem often starts with a technical process called supply path optimization, Hochleutner says. To lower costs, many advertisers reduce the number of intermediaries, or "hops," it takes to reach a publisher. While spreadsheet friendly, it's a move that comes at an audience cost. The penalty is especially harsh for burgeoning communities like fans of women's sports, who may have fiercely loyal but niche audiences. "It's going to be a lot more hops to get to a women's sports publisher, and these smaller players are not able to meet the requirements of typical ad buys," she observes.

That pressure is amplified by a political climate that has led some brands to deprioritize DEI initiatives. With the shutdown of self-regulation bodies like the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), many brands must now set their own standards. As a path forward, Hochleutner suggests brands reframe the conversation from politics to quality, seeking out environments that foster genuine connection and are free from the clutter of low-quality 'Made for Advertising' (MFA) sites.

• The performance paradox: This focus on quality can manifest in a number of ways, from supporting niche digital communities to creating memorable, in-person activations. Fage’s yogurt lounge at the US Open, for example, created direct brand affinity for Hochleutner. When budgets get tight, brand marketing is often the first to be cut in favor of performance, even as performance marketing relies on a strong brand foundation to be effective. "You go to an event and there is zero MFA. It creates a brand loyalty that you'll never be able to replicate otherwise. You're actually in front of your customers, putting a face to the brand, and especially in this age of AI, that's the most important thing," she says, underscoring that this direct connection is vital whether in a physical space or a highly curated digital environment.

• Misunderstood metrics: The core of the scale/quality problem is a measurement crisis. Hochleutner saw it up close at Google, where a tool designed to optimize for 'viewability' was often misused by advertisers as a crude proxy for quality, creating a conflict between performance goals and brand safety. "I don't know the answer, but I know that it's not viewability. All these metrics can be gamed," she states.

Rather than hoping AI will solve the measurement gap, she hopes the industry will learn from the mistakes of platforms like Facebook, where algorithms designed to commoditize inventory ended up amplifying low-quality content. She concludes with a push for a "flight to quality," creating a system that rewards publishers for good content over sheer scale as the industry prepares for the future of advertising.

"Right now, publishers are disincentivized to have great content. They're incentivized only for scale," she stresses. "As buyers, we have to put our money where our mouth is and invest in quality. We need to learn from the era of social media algorithms and figure out: how can we incentivize publishers for good content?" For Hochleutner, it’s not about scale or over-optimizing. It’s about delivering quality content to the right people, in the places where they’re already engaged.