What happens when your DSP scores the inventory?

Greater transparency in programmatic is a really great thing, but we’re not there yet. When the DSP - the platform delivering your budgets - is also the one surfacing quality signals there’s a real risk of misaligned incentives.

That’s the conversation recently sparked by OpenSincera, which is The Trade Desk’s move to surface inventory quality signals across the open web. It’s a welcome step, but it’s not the whole solution to increase transparency for media planners. In a recent blog, we uncovered exactly what OpenSincera offers to buyers - and what it doesn’t. In this blog, we focus on a different risk - relying on quality signals from the same platform that optimises your spend.

When the DSP controls both how inventory is scored and how it’s applied, it creates a closed loop where buyers lose visibility and control. You’re trusting a system where the definitions of 'quality' are set by the same entity making the delivery decisions, and that means you don’t get to challenge or customise the rules.

That’s not transparency - that’s dependency.

A Step in the Right Direction 

The launch of OpenSincera tells the industry one thing loud and clear: inventory quality matters. It’s something we’ve been saying and building Picnic around for years. So, it’s great to see the biggest DSP in the world publicly validate that idea and create noise around it within the industry. However, OpenSincera is owned by the same platform responsible for applying the inventory and only a handful of quality signals have been released to the public. The rest? Kept in-platform and used by The Trade Desk to optimise its own outcomes - it’s selective disclosure.
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Buyers Still Don’t Have Transparency

While a few raw signals are a good start, they fall short of the transparency buyers need to make informed, brand-safe decisions. Ad experience is incredibly complex; sticky videos, intrusive pop-ups, autoplay and ad collision, are all things that define how a user experiences a webpage. Ad experience also dictates how your ad performs, ultimately impacting brand outcomes. If buyers only have access to domain-level summaries and partial data, they’re still don’t have the full picture. It looks like visibility, but it doesn’t give enough control to media planners.

Why Independence Matters More Than Ever

Programmatic is moving fast. With AI-led buying and automated curation on the rise, media teams are under pressure to optimise at scale without compromising budgets. OpenSincera’s four free signals might offer some benefits to teams facing this pressure, but buyers risk losing leverage when the same platform optimising where their spend goes is also the one giving insight into its quality. That’s because the definition of “quality” comes from the (supposedly independent) tech platform, not the media planner. Would you really let the car dealership inspect and report on the condition of a car you’re interested in buying? If your scoring system is owned by the DSP, then you don’t get to decide what “good” looks like. It also raises bigger strategic risks:

• What happens when that data changes or disappears?
• What if the scoring logic evolves to favour inventory the platform wants to push?
• What leverage do you have when the same company is setting the rules and controlling the outcome?

Even with the best intentions, the incentives aren’t aligned. A DSP is built to maximise ad placements, optimise revenue and keep clients buying. But those objectives don’t always match what media teams need, especially when it comes to quality, risk or brand safety. OpenSincera is a sign that quality is finally on the agenda. Whilst that’s progress for buyers, it’s not enough to rely on what a single platform decides to reveal, or that platform’s definition of quality.

Real transparency is independent, and real brand outcomes come from using quality as a lever, not a buzzword.

What PIQ Gives You That Open Frameworks Can’t

PIQ turns 100+ quality signals into three clear scores you can actually break down and apply to your campaigns:

1. Ad Experience – How cluttered is the page? Do users have space to engage with (or even see) your ad, or are they overwhelmed? Are there intrusive sticky ads that play automatically?
   
2. Publisher Profile – What kind of environment are you funding? Are these reputable, trusted sites, or low-value domains built for arbitrage?
   
3. PIQ Score – A single overarching quality score, that you can adapt to your own threshold of ‘quality’. Because just knowing the ad density of a site doesn’t tell you if it’s right for your brand.
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Want to see how PIQ can help you to build better site lists, reduce waste, and improve outcomes?
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