By Jeff Hirsch, General Manager, Advertising, JWX
Why the conditions that held brands back from owning their media infrastructure are rapidly disappearing.
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For years, the debate over in-housing programmatic media buying has been framed as a question of capability. Could a brand truly replicate what a specialized agency provides? Did they have the data science talent, the platform expertise, the scale to negotiate favorable terms? For most marketers, the honest answer was “not quite” — and that gap kept the agency partnership model central to how programmatic got done.
That calculus is changing. And I believe we are approaching an inflection point that will meaningfully shift where programmatic expertise lives — and who controls the decisions that drive media performance.
Procter & Gamble didn’t stumble into in-housing — they executed it deliberately and with discipline. I know this story well as I brought AudienceScience to P&G to support their famous Hawkeye initiative. Marc Pritchard, P&G’s Chief Brand Officer, reported at the ANA’s 2024 Media Conference that P&G now handles nearly all media buying in-house in the US and China, with European markets following suit. The results speak plainly: a documented 10% reduction in media costs, with $65M in savings demonstrated in fabric care alone before the model was expanded across categories.
What did P&G actually gain? Three things that no agency contract can fully deliver: cost transparency, data ownership, and operational control.
Pritchard has been candid about what prompted this shift. Too many untransparent “touches” in the programmatic supply chain diverting ad dollars. Platforms offering “zero transparency” on what actually happens to spend. Measurement that produces diagnostics instead of sales outcomes. These aren’t niche complaints — they are structural problems baked into a model where your media partner and your supply chain auditor are effectively the same party.
In-housing doesn’t eliminate these problems overnight. But it puts the brand in a position to confront them directly, rather than waiting on a third party to act in their interest.
Here is where the story gets genuinely interesting for 2025 and beyond.
The honest reason more brands didn’t follow P&G’s lead sooner wasn’t a lack of desire — it was a lack of infrastructure. Running programmatic at scale requires sophisticated bid management, real-time audience segmentation, cross-channel attribution, supply path optimization, and continuous creative testing. Building those capabilities internally demanded teams, technology stacks, and institutional knowledge that took years to develop.
AI is collapsing that timeline.
What once required a team of data scientists and a six-figure agency retainer can now be executed by a lean internal team supported by AI-driven tooling. Sixty-one percent of brand and agency marketers are already using AI for programmatic advertising, and the use cases are no longer theoretical — they include real-time bid adjustments, predictive audience modeling, dynamic creative optimization, and AI-powered attribution that operates without individual-level tracking. P&G itself has leveraged AI to bring ad concept development from weeks to minutes, and to run pre-market testing at one-tenth of the prior cost.
The operational complexity that justified outsourcing programmatic is being automated away. And when the complexity disappears, so does the rationale for paying an intermediary to manage it.
There’s a more nuanced point worth making here: in-housing isn’t just about cost reduction — it’s about orchestration.
Modern programmatic isn’t a single channel. It spans display, CTV, digital out-of-home, programmatic audio, retail media, and private marketplace deals, all of which need to operate in concert against a unified view of the consumer. That orchestration challenge is exactly where brands that have already brought their data and buying infrastructure in-house have a structural advantage over those still working through agency intermediaries with fragmented reporting and misaligned incentives.
This is precisely where technologies like QuantumPath's orchestration capabilities are creating meaningful leverage for brands beginning to centralize their media infrastructure.
By enabling brands to centralize campaign logic, data flows, and optimization signals across leading DSPs - including DV360 and The Trade Desk, with additional integrations launching later this year - QuantumPath puts the brand - not the agency - in the decision seat. When your first-party data, your bidding strategy, and your measurement framework are connected under your own operational control, you can iterate at the speed AI enables rather than at the speed an agency billing cycle allows.
That’s not a theoretical advantage. It’s a structural one.
To be clear: this isn’t an obituary for agencies. P&G itself has said that agency partners remain valuable, particularly for automation support and supply chain simplification. The strongest agencies will evolve toward strategic counsel, creative partnership, and specialist execution — roles that benefit from external perspective and multi-client experience.
What is changing is the center of gravity. The brand will hold the data, own the technology stack, and control the optimization logic. Agencies will operate as vendors in that ecosystem, not as its architects.
For CMOs, that distinction matters enormously. When the media strategy is owned externally, brand knowledge is siloed in a partner who serves dozens of other clients. When it’s owned internally, it compounds over time — every campaign teaches the next one, every data point strengthens the model.
The brands that move now will build capabilities that become genuine competitive moats. Those that wait are not just paying higher media costs — they are accumulating a capability deficit that grows harder to close with each passing year.
The technology required to execute this transition exists today. The AI tools that remove the talent barriers are mature and accessible. The cost savings are proven at the scale of the world’s largest advertiser. The only remaining question is organizational will.
P&G asked that question a decade ago and has been banking the answer ever since.
The rest of the market is running out of reasons to keep waiting.
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The views expressed in this post reflect our perspective as a technology platform serving enterprise media buyers. We believe brands deserve full ownership of their media infrastructure — and we build toward that conviction every day.