— Doug Weaver, Upstream Group
Direct mail is an amazing thing. It costs something like $750 CPM to put a glossy catalogue in the mail, but somehow direct marketers make those numbers work. They know exactly which households to target, what offers will resonate, and how to measure the results down to the penny.
Digital advertising should be even better. We have tracking pixels, cookies, real-time data, and CPMs that are a fraction of direct mail. Yet somehow, the process of buying and selling premium digital advertising is stuck in the 1990s.
The RFP Charade
Doug Weaver's quote should stop every digital publisher in their tracks. When you respond to an RFP, there's an 80% chance you're wasting your time. The agency already knows who they want to buy from. The RFP is just a procurement exercise—a way to document that they "considered alternatives" before going with their predetermined choice.
Think about what that means for your sales operation:
- Your sellers spend hours crafting custom proposals
- Your ad ops team pulls inventory reports and checks availability
- Your pricing team models different package options
- Your legal team reviews custom terms
All of that work, and four out of five times, you never had a chance. The business was going somewhere else before the RFP even hit your inbox.
Why the System Persists
If the RFP process is so broken, why does it continue? Several reasons:
Procurement requirements: Large advertisers have purchasing processes that require competitive bids. Even if the media team knows exactly where they want to buy, procurement needs documentation.
Rate benchmarking: Agencies use RFPs to establish pricing baselines. Even if they're not going to buy from you, your rate card helps them negotiate with the publisher they actually want.
Relationship maintenance: Buyers send RFPs to publishers they want to stay connected with, even when there's no real opportunity. It's a way of saying "we're still thinking about you" without committing to anything.
Lack of alternatives: Until recently, there was no other way to discover inventory and pricing across multiple publishers. The RFP was a necessary evil.
The Programmatic Direct Alternative
Programmatic direct changes the equation entirely. Instead of the RFP charade, buyers can:
- See real-time availability across multiple publishers simultaneously
- Compare pricing without forcing publishers to respond to speculative requests
- Execute instantly when they find what they need
- Reserve inventory before a competitor does
For publishers, this means no more wasting resources on RFPs that were never going to convert. Instead, they can focus on building genuine relationships with buyers who are actually in-market.
The Strategic Buyer Emerges
The death of transactional RFPs doesn't mean the death of relationships. If anything, it elevates them.
When the commodity buying moves to automated systems, what remains is the strategic work: developing custom programs, creating integrated sponsorships, building content partnerships. These high-value activities require human relationships and can't be reduced to a transactional workflow.
The publishers who thrive in this new world will be the ones who:
- Embrace automation for transactional business
- Redeploy freed-up resources toward strategic partnerships
- Develop differentiated offerings that can't be commoditized
- Build data assets that make their inventory more valuable
The Timeline
Change won't happen overnight. The RFP process is deeply embedded in how agencies operate, and inertia is powerful. But the economics are undeniable. Every hour a seller spends on a losing RFP is an hour that could have been spent on a winning deal.
Smart publishers are already preparing for this transition. They're investing in technology that can support programmatic direct workflows. They're training their teams on new selling motions. They're building the operational infrastructure to process orders at higher velocity with lower overhead.
The transactional RFP business isn't dead yet. But it's definitely dying. And the publishers who recognize that reality today will be the ones who thrive tomorrow.
Chris O'Hara was Chief Revenue Officer at Bionic Advertising Systems, a programmatic direct technology company.