The NewFronts and Upfronts are consuming every calendar and conversation of late. Every agency is locked in on securing inventory, negotiating rates, and squeezing as much performance out of every media dollar they have.
Meanwhile, there's a profitability leak lurking quietly in the background: Ad serving.
Agencies are overpaying for campaign activation, driven by redundant vendors, hidden fees, outdated pricing models, and rate cards no one ever revisits. Layer in duplicate workflows running in parallel, but never connecting, and costs quickly add up.
The result is inflated fees with little visibility into total delivery costs, and the worst time to be surprised by this number is right after Upfront season.
Delivery Fee Inflation is Real
Today, most agencies are running separate ad tech stacks for linear, CTV, digital, and social. Each comes with its own vendor relationships, contracts, and fee structure that is rarely noticed or rationalized. It just keeps accumulating.
Meanwhile, delivery costs compound quietly in the background. By the time someone finally audits it, the inefficiency feels like critical infrastructure. It isn't, it’s waste.
Reduce Costs Without Starting Over
XR consolidates all delivery and ad serving into a single platform, the same one most agencies are already using for linear. The addition of ad serving requires no migration, no rip-and-replace. You're streamlining an existing workflow, not starting over. The immediate result is measurable cost reduction at one of the most expensive points in the stack. In fact, many agencies we work with cut ad serving and delivery costs by 50%, just by switching to XR.
How is this possible? Ad serving is the easiest entry point because the savings show up immediately. It’s a non-working media cost that can flip to the working side of the ledger fast.
But once delivery is consolidated, the downstream benefits spread across ad ops broadly: fewer vendor touchpoints, fewer invoicing issues, simpler workflows, and less time lost chasing discrepancies. Your team gets time back and your CFO gets margin back.
How to Take Action Now
Most agencies are already running lean, and clients are scrutinizing budgets more than ever. Every dollar lost to vendor overlap is a dollar that should be going into working media. So where do you start?
- Start with a quick audit. Pull together what you’re spending on ad serving and delivery across channels. If you’ve never done it, the number will likely shock you.
- Then map that against what a consolidated approach could look like. Cutting costs by up to 50% is a realistic outcome when you remove redundancies.
- Bring XR into the mix. We’ll look at your numbers and show you where the savings are.
The timing couldn’t be better. Upfront season already has you deep in budget conversations, which makes it the perfect moment to ask: how much are we actually paying just to turn campaigns on?
The good news is this is fixable. No overhaul, no disruption, no downtime.
Who We Roll With
