The NYT's 'value over volume' approach to SSP selection is a blueprint for leaner, smarter ad tech stacks. Here's what Southeast Asian brands can learn.
The average brand running programmatic in Southeast Asia has somewhere between eight and fifteen SSP relationships. Most of them exist because someone, at some point, said yes to a sales call.
That’s not a stack. That’s sediment.
The NYT’s Uncomfortable Lesson for Ad Tech Buyers
AdExchanger’s recent conversation with Courtney Glaze, VP of Revenue Operations at The New York Times, surfaces a philosophy that should make a lot of programmatic teams uncomfortable: every ad tech partner has to earn its place in the stack. Not get inherited. Not slide in during a platform trial. Earn it.
The NYT’s approach flips the default logic of SSP selection — where publishers add partners like insurance policies, assuming more demand sources equals more competition equals higher yields. Glaze’s position is that undifferentiated demand just creates noise. A smaller, curated set of partners with clear, measurable value contribution outperforms a bloated roster where half the integrations are effectively redundant. The strategic implication for buy-side teams is just as sharp: if you can’t articulate what a specific DSP, DMP, or measurement vendor does that no other tool in your stack does, you probably don’t need it.
Retail Media’s Leadership Vacuum Is a Stack Problem in Disguise
The exit of Brian Monahan from Albertsons Media Collective — reported by Digiday — is being framed as a leadership story. But underneath the org-chart drama is a more structural tension: retail media networks are expanding their technical and commercial ambitions faster than their operational infrastructure can support.
Albertsons is hardly alone. Across Southeast Asia, retail media is accelerating through platforms like Lazada and Shopee, both of which now offer first-party audience targeting, onsite placements, and offsite programmatic inventory. The brands activating against these networks are often doing so with disconnected measurement frameworks — one team tracking ROAS inside the retail platform’s dashboard, another running attribution through a third-party tool, and nobody reconciling the two.
When leadership turns over at a retail media network, the brands that feel it least are the ones who built clean data pipelines and clear success metrics from the start. Those who were relying on a relationship to hold the integration together suddenly find themselves exposed.
The ‘Value Over Volume’ Audit: A Practical Starting Point
Applying the NYT’s partner discipline to a brand’s buy-side stack starts with a deceptively simple question: what is this tool’s unique contribution to revenue or efficiency, and how would I know if it stopped working?
For most teams, running that audit surfaces three categories of tools: the load-bearing ones (non-negotiable, deeply integrated), the convenient ones (nice-to-have, moderate switching cost), and the legacy ones (inherited, under-utilised, kept because nobody reviewed the contract). In practice, the third category tends to represent 20–30% of total martech and adtech spend.
For Southeast Asian brands running multi-platform campaigns across mobile web, app, and commerce environments, the audit gets more complex — but also more urgent. Platform-walled gardens like LINE in Thailand or Grab’s ecosystem in Singapore and Indonesia have their own attribution logic, their own creative specs, and their own data terms. Layering third-party tools on top of those environments without a clear interoperability plan is how stacks become expensive and unmanageable. Before adding another partner, map what you actually have — and what each piece is doing that the others cannot.
Precision Beats Proliferation, Every Time
There’s a version of martech and adtech strategy that treats comprehensiveness as safety. If we have every tool, we’re covered. The NYT’s Courtney Glaze makes a compelling counter-argument: comprehensiveness is a cost centre. Precision is a competitive advantage.
This matters especially for mid-to-large brands in Southeast Asia operating across multiple markets with different platform ecosystems, different measurement standards, and different regulatory environments around data. The temptation is to solve that complexity with more technology. The smarter move is usually to do fewer things with higher conviction — fewer SSP relationships with clearer performance agreements, fewer data vendors with stronger first-party data foundations, fewer attribution tools with better cross-platform coverage.
The brands running the cleanest stacks right now aren’t the ones with the biggest technology budgets. They’re the ones who asked hard questions about what they actually need — and had the discipline to stop buying things that couldn’t answer them.
Key Takeaways
- Audit for unique contribution: Every tool in your stack should have a clearly defensible reason for existing that no other tool in the stack already covers.
- Retail media integrations need data architecture, not just relationships: As retail media scales across Lazada, Shopee, and regional platforms, clean measurement infrastructure matters more than account management access.
- Precision over proliferation applies on the buy side too: Fewer, better-integrated partners consistently outperform sprawling, under-activated stacks — especially across Southeast Asia’s fragmented platform landscape.
The real question isn’t how many tools your brand has. It’s how many of them you could remove tomorrow without noticing. That number is probably higher than your team wants to admit — and lower than it should be.
At grzzly, we work with marketing and growth teams across Southeast Asia who’ve inherited complex stacks and want to understand what’s actually pulling weight. Whether it’s mapping your adtech architecture, auditing retail media integrations, or finding the redundancies that are quietly draining budget, we bring the same discipline the NYT applies to its SSP roster. Let’s talk
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Crispy GrizzlyAuditing, assembling, and occasionally dismantling marketing technology stacks for brands that have over-bought and under-activated. Precision over proliferation.