At Cannes this year, AI was a common thread in every serious conversation about monetizing an audience. Not just as a concept, but as a factor already shaping how media companies work.

Many companies that once invested in building their own monetization stack are now reconsidering that approach because of AI’s recent advances. In-housing was meant to create independence and provide more control over data, performance, and long-term strategy. But maintaining that control has become more difficult as the technological landscape has changed.

The sovereignty era is reaching its limits

For the last decade, many media companies invested in building their own monetization infrastructure. The goal was sovereignty—the ability to operate independently, without relying on third parties. That meant owning the monetization stack, including header bidding setups, yield strategies, direct demand paths, performance analytics, and consent systems, along with the data used to optimize formats and price.

This movement was shaped by consultants and public success stories from large media groups that positioned in-housing as a path to control. When ads.txt and Supply Path Optimization (SPO) exposed how much advertiser spend was lost to intermediaries, it felt like further proof that the system needed to be rebuilt from the inside out. One infamous 2020 study by ISBA and PwC found that publishers receive approximately half of advertiser spend. Of that 51%, the study could attribute 35% to suppliers including the agency, DSP, technology providers and SSP.

For a while, in-housing gave media companies more transparency, tighter feedback loops, and the ability to align monetization with editorial priorities. It was also a hedge against platform dependency, especially as privacy regulation and signal loss made it harder to rely on third-party tools. But as AI has reshaped programmatic ecosystem, the cost of sovereignty has gone up.

“Some of the very publishers who championed in-housing are handing back control of key components of their stack to external partners,” said Pierre Orlac’h, founder and Chief Supply officer at Sparteo in an interview with MediaShotz at Cannes Lions 2025.

“Why? Because they realise that operating and maintaining a performant monetisation infrastructure requires deep technical expertise, constant tuning, and real-time optimization – capabilities that go far beyond plugging in a few wrappers.”

The idea of sovereignty hasn’t disappeared, but its definition is evolving. For many media companies, it now means maintening control of strategy while relying on fewer, more capable partners to handle execution.

AI has raised the technical bar

Maintaining your own monetization stack used to mean managing wrappers, routing demand, and configuring reports. That might have included setting up Prebid, stitching together analytics from multiple vendors, and building basic yield rules across formats. Today, it means something else entirely.

As AI systems have become standard across the programmatic ecosystem, the execution layer has shifted from rule-based logic to predictive automation:

• Bidding decisions are made based on trained models that update continuously
• Performance is optimized in real time, not measured after the fact
• Privacy compliance depends on systems that can interpret and apply consent status dynamically, across environments

These are not plug-and-play tasks; they require a massive amount of engineering resources. This further widens the gap between the strategic goals media companies want to control and the resources and expertise needed to build the systems required to execute those goals. Owning the stack now means running infrastructure that includes model deployment, log-level data processing, cross-format auction tuning, and constant adaptation to auction mechanics that continue to evolve.

At Cannes, this reality was clear as conversations were less about what AI could enable and more about what it now demands. The bar is higher, and more media companies are deciding that it doesn’t make sense to split their focus trying to match it on their own.

How to own the strategy but delegate the execution

The shift away from full in-housing doesn’t mean returning to fragmented vendor stacks. Media companies still want control, just not at the cost of managing infrastructure they can’t realistically sustain. As a result, many are choosing to focus on strategy while working with a smaller number of partners that can support execution at the standard AI now requires.

Sparteo is one of those partners. The company was founded by former media executives who had firsthand experience managing monetization with limited tools, siloed data, and third parties that offered little transparency. Our solutions are designed to solve those problems by absorbing the technical complexity of modern ad operations while giving you visibility into what’s performing and why.

Sparteo’s infrastructure includes a set of integrated products that cover monetization, delivery, and analysis.

• Actirise Analytics gives media companies real-time visibility into revenue performance from display ads at the article level. Teams can track RPMs, understand what’s driving monetization, and make live decisions about what to promote, prioritize, or repackage.
• Meetscale handles bidding, delivery, and demand routing through a server-side architecture that minimizes latency and reduces cost.
• Viously manages video delivery across web and CTV, using metadata to pair the right content with the right environment.
• Voxeus supports monetization for audio content, including podcast episodes, embedded players, and audio articles.
• FastCMP ensures that consent data is collected and enforced properly across environments, keeping monetization compliant and data usable.

Underlying all of this are the AI technologies Sparteo has built into the platform. SONAR powers performance prediction across formats, helping prioritize which impressions are most likely to complete or convert before they’re even served. For publishers, Semantic Discovery structures and enriches metadata, especially for video, making content easier to classify, optimize, and monetize.

Together, these tools allow media companies to stay focused on the parts of the business they’re best equipped to lead, like content and audience growth, without falling behind on the infrastructure that now powers monetization performance.

Media companies now have the opportunity to focus on what they do best: create and distribute content

Owning the entire stack isn’t the only way to stay in control, and as we saw at Cannes Lions 2025, it’s increasingly not the most effective one. The media companies that are adapting fastest are the ones that have stopped trying to do everything themselves and started focusing on the parts of the business where their influence matters most.

That means investing in editorial strategy, audience development, and product direction—not in building AI tech, maintaining log-level pipelines, or keeping up with auction logic. Those systems now require more specialization than most media companies can sustain, and for most, they’re no longer the bottleneck to growth.

[Media companies; should continue to create article, video, and podcast content,” Orlac’h told MediaShotz. “They should continue to concentrate on what they are doing the best—creating the best content and generating audiences. I think that for the monetization, they should have confidence in the ad tech companies that are building strong technologies with strong AI algorithms and with strong infrastructure. Then they will see better results and have a bright future.

The companies that take this approach aren’t giving up control; they’re focusing it. They’re aligning the right internal teams around the decisions that move the business, and choosing partners who can keep everything else running at the standard AI now demands.

If that’s the shift you’re already making, or thinking about, contact our team to see how Sparteo’s solutions can support you.

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