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Supply Shaping Delivers Performance Lift for Advertisers
What was Butler/Till looking to achieve for their health and wellness client?
Butler/Till’s client was a leading health and wellness brand with more than 1,000 locations across the US. The client had 18 high-priority markets where they wanted to increase efficiency. Their key measurement metric was CPA — so the challenge for Butler/Till was to reduce CPA across their 18 target markets.
The agency knew they still needed local precision targeting at a scale that would deliver true CPA reduction across the entire campaign, but had to find a way to increase efficiency and performance of every impression.
Butler/Till wanted to reduce the inherent waste in the programmatic ecosystem and access more good impressions. Managing campaigns across dozens of markets typically introduces supply fragmentation, duplicated inventory, and inflated prices. Butler/Till needed a way to simplify the supply path automatically at scale while still maintaining the flexibility and intelligence required to tailor media delivery market by market.
Why did Butler/Till select OpenX and SWYM to help?
Butler/Till already worked closely with OpenX and SWYM on other campaigns and knew that they could achieve significant efficiency by applying SWYM’s unique supply shaping model to OpenX’s high-quality inventory to target their intended local audiences.
SWYM’s upstream intelligence paired seamlessly with OpenX’s platform and identity-driven infrastructure. Together, they enabled Butler/Till to activate locally optimized supply paths across multiple U.S. markets through a single, scalable workflow. OpenX provided premium, transparent inventory access, while SWYM ensured that only the most relevant impressions were surfaced for bidding across target markets.
What was SWYM’s role in the partnership?
SWYM acted as the intelligent decisioning layer, giving access to decisioning before the bid on the supply side. Its AI-native platform evaluated bid requests in real time, filtering and prioritizing supply based on performance signals, geography, and relevance before bids were placed. Instead of relying on DSP optimization alone, SWYM reshaped the supply landscape itself — giving Butler/Till cleaner, more efficient access to inventory aligned with campaign goals.
What is supply shaping and how did it work in this campaign?
SWYM improves performance by providing an intelligence layer before the bid on the supply side — this gives buyers like Butler/Till the ability to access more relevant impressions, filter our irrelevant impressions and simplify their media buying. Working with SWYM increased the quality of every bid opportunity. By eliminating low-performing impressions upstream, the platform reduced competition on irrelevant inventory and concentrated spend on supply proven to drive results.
Most media buying happens only after the bid occurs. Due to a number of complicating factors including bid throttling, duplication and overly complicated supply paths, buyers don’t always get access to the best impressions. Getting access to impressions before the bid is like evaluating and filtering at the source. This gives buyers a much higher quality flow of impressions while eliminating the waste in the system.
What was OpenX’s role in the partnership?
OpenX, a leading SSPs in programmatic advertising, provides direct access to high-quality supply, enabling Butler/Till to activate a highly local targeting campaign at a massive scale.
OpenX acted as the supply-side partner for the Butler/Till campaign, providing streamlined access to transparent, quality inventory. The solution was deployed as intelligent deals via OpenXSelect™, enabling Butler/Till to tap into curated inventory with strong identity signals and scalable reach across the 18 targeted U.S. markets.
OpenX’s infrastructure ensured that the campaign could be activated against inventory that met brand safety, transparency, and performance standards, and that those impressions could be scaled consistently across local geographies. In this way, OpenX translated strategic media decisions into measurable delivery and outcomes.
What role did AI and feedback loops play in ongoing optimization?
SWYM’s platform continuously ingested performance signals at the local level and fed those learnings back into its decisioning engine. These feedback loops allowed supply paths to evolve in near real time, adapting to changing market dynamics and audience behavior. The result was sustained performance improvement throughout the campaign, not just early wins.
The campaign delivered meaningful efficiency and performance gains across multiple markets, including a 57% reduction in cost per action (CPA). By focusing spend on higher-quality, better-performing supply, Butler/Till was able to achieve stronger results while operating within a simpler, more transparent supply framework — validating the impact of upstream supply shaping at scale.
What does this partnership signal about the future of programmatic buying?
This collaboration highlights a broader shift in programmatic toward intelligent supply control, not just bid optimization. As advertisers demand both precision and scale, platforms like SWYM demonstrate that the future lies in making smarter decisions earlier in the process. Supply shaping, powered by AI and activated through premium partners like OpenX, is quickly becoming a cornerstone of high-performance programmatic strategies.
