Georgia-Pacific trims 30+ SSPs to about 6, cuts CPMs up to 44% with SWYM
Paras Shah, Georgia-Pacific's senior director of digital media, said the company spent years tightening its demand-side platform work after bringing programmatic buying in-house in 2019, sharpening inventory control, campaign pacing and targeting. By 2024 those changes had run their course, so the team turned to the supply side and adopted SWYM, a tool that sits between Georgia-Pacific's programmatic team and the marketplaces it buys from and screens bid requests with predictive signals before the auction. CPMs have fallen 17% to 44% depending on the brand, viewability is up 11%, video completion rates are up 7%, and a partnership with Fou Analytics has cut invalid traffic by about 8%. Georgia-Pacific also cut its SSP roster from more than 30 to roughly six, judging each supplier on how well it turns shared inventory into higher-quality, cheaper placements. "We wanted to score the inventory before the bid," Shah said.
Media buyers managing large programmatic budgets get a benchmark here: cutting an SSP roster by two-thirds while CPMs fall and viewability rises shows what supply-side curation delivers when it gets proper investment. Holdcos already treat this kind of curation as standard practice because their spend justifies the tooling, and OpenX svp Stacy Bohrer said buyers outside the holdcos are moving the same direction, demanding IQ scoring, ad-adjacency filtering, brand suitability controls and supply chains capped at two nodes. SSP fee transparency looks set to become the next pressure point, echoing the scrutiny DSPs faced a few years ago. Agencies evaluating SSP partners can borrow Georgia-Pacific's scorecard: viewability lift, completion rate lift and invalid traffic reduction alongside price.