Rethinking Premium Inventory: A Q&A with Sharethrough on Quality, Sustainability, and Smarter Targeting

As part of our ongoing effort to spotlight the value of our key Supply Side Partners (SSPs), we reached out to leaders across our network to address one key question: What does “premium inventory” really mean in today’s digital landscape—and how can advertisers make the most of it?

We’re proud to kick off this series with insights from our partners at Sharethrough, a company we work with regularly to deliver high-quality, innovative media solutions for our clients. Their team consistently brings forward-thinking strategies, a strong commitment to sustainability, and an audience-first mindset that aligns with our shared mission of smarter, more effective advertising.

We spoke with Frank Maguire, SVP of Product Marketing & Sustainability, to learn more about how Sharethrough approaches brand safety, audience targeting, and supply path optimization in ways that empower advertisers to connect with consumers more meaningfully. Let’s drive in.

A Quick Overview: Sharethrough’s Approach to Supporting Advertisers

Can you briefly overview your company and how you support advertisers?

Sharethrough, which recently merged with Equativ, is a leading omnichannel ad exchange focused on building a sustainable advertising ecosystem. We are uniquely positioned in the market to provide access to innovative ad formats designed to optimize for attention and performance across quality, global supply that has proven to drive strong performance.

Some of the ways we support advertisers include: 

• Global Impact, Premium Quality: We offer an extensive global network to engage diverse audiences while ensuring premium quality standards.
  
• Sustainability & Progressive Leadership: As the first ad exchange to launch Green Media Products, we help advertisers reduce their digital campaign carbon footprint. This year, we are hosting our 3rd annual Green Media Summit to discuss sustainability in media and drive the industry toward ethical, impactful actions for a sustainable future.
  
• Innovative Ad Formats: We provide attention-grabbing formats that enhance performance across CTV, Video, Display, and Native at no extra cost.
  
• Removal of MFA Sites: We were the first SSP to eliminate Made for Advertising (MFA) sites from PMPs, ensuring better quality and more valuable inventory for buyers and rewarding quality publishers. 

Delivering Brand-Safe, Fraud-Free Inventory

What brand safety and quality standards do you maintain for your inventory?

We prioritize brand safety and quality, using multiple solutions to ensure we deliver brand-safe, fraud-free inventory.

All publishers on our exchange must meet our inventory standards and undergo a thorough review by our inventory quality team to ensure compliance with our supply policy. We also collaborate with Adverif.ai to vet new domains and partner with HUMAN to prevent fraudulent activity and invalid traffic. For advertisers focusing on contextual targeting, we work with Zvelo to allow for category exclusions.

To prevent malware delivery, we route ads through Confiant, which detects and blocks harmful ads in real-time, safeguarding both publishers and users. Additionally, Confiant’s creative malware detection technology helps block malicious creatives, ensuring our clients’ peace of mind. All of this led to us being TAG Platinum Certified for brand safety.  

What “Premium” Means in Practice

What criteria are used to define your inventory as premium or high-quality?

We prioritize sourcing new direct inventory from Comscore premium publishers across all supported formats before submitting it to our Marketplace Quality team for approval. They evaluate the inventory for directness, copyright risk, misinformation, and traffic quality. Any flagged sites are automatically rejected. Approved inventory undergoes continuous monitoring and an invalid traffic assessment (IVT) to remove domains and apps that surpass our IVT threshold.

Our Publisher team ensures high-quality inventory and the most direct supply path, enforcing Ads.txt, App-Ads.txt, and Sellers.json standards. We proactively identify outdated or incorrect entries and optimize supply paths by excluding non-direct or non-unique routes.

We also partner with Jounce Media to classify all our inventory into the Jounce categorizations around site quality and directness. Our advertisers can target using these dimensions via deals, and we use Jounce data to remove MFA by default.

Audience Insights That Drive Strategy

What insights are you able to surface for advertisers to use to help them better understand their audiences?

Our partnership with GWI allows us to provide deep, survey-driven insights that help advertisers understand their audiences on a granular level. We have access to demographics, psychographics, interests, online behaviors, media consumption, purchasing habits, and brand affinities. This data, collected from a respondent pool representing 50+ markets, allows us to share the latest consumer attitude trends, motivations, and decision-making processes.

We also offer bespoke audience segmentation, enabling advertisers to create highly targeted and actionable personas based on behaviors, value, and intent and conduct our own research to gain greater insights into the topics that we know advertisers care about. 

How do these audience insights help advertisers reach more effectively?

Insights can empower advertisers as they create and optimize their strategies. We provide data that helps them identify the right target audiences and craft more relevant messaging for better results.

Through examining consumer preferences, media habits, and purchase intent advertisers can personalize campaigns to ensure their message resonates with the right audience. Additionally, our platform offers cross-channel analysis, helping brands understand where their audiences are most engaged.

Reaching Diverse, High-Intent, and Niche Audiences

How do your audience insights help advertisers reach diverse, unique, or hard-to-reach audiences?

Our research platform provides comprehensive insights that reveal the behaviors, preferences, and motivations of diverse, unique, and hard-to-reach audiences. By analyzing data across demographics, cultural backgrounds, niche interests, and emerging trends, we help brands go beyond traditional targeting methods to segment and engage audiences effectively.

With a combination of global and local market data, we provide advertisers with deeper insights into underrepresented groups, high-intent consumers, and emerging subcultures. Our platform also tracks digital behaviors across multiple touchpoints, allowing advertisers to identify where these audiences are most active.

Additionally, our real-time trend tracking and psychographic insights enable advertisers to craft messages that are not only relevant but culturally resonant. This empowers brands to build authentic connections with hard-to-reach consumers, driving meaningful engagement and fostering long-term loyalty.

Right Message, Right Moment

How do you enable advertisers to reach relevant audiences within the right timeline?

At Sharethrough, we empower advertisers to reach the most relevant audiences at the right moment by leveraging data-driven insights and research-backed trends.

We continuously analyze consumer behavior, seasonal trends, and market shifts, helping advertisers align their campaigns with the most relevant moments. Through category-specific insights and historical performance data, we provide advertisers with proactive recommendations to maximize reach and engagement.

Through pre-built and custom seasonal packages that align with key consumer moments (Black Friday, Back to School, Major Sporting Events, etc.), we can ensure advertisers reach their audiences when engagement is highest.

Through the use of alternative, non-cookie-based identity, we also maximize the ability to leverage audience data through DSP targeting features outside of cookied web environments.

Smarter Supply Paths = Better ROI

Is there anything unique about your approach to supply path optimization (SPO) that advertisers should know?

Ultimately, we’ve developed a supply path optimization strategy that leads to better performance and ROI. 

We offer the most direct access to inventory. We exclude non-value-added resellers and enforce Ads.txt, app-ads.txt, and sellers.json on all our publisher accounts. In addition, our SPO process analyzes non-direct paths to understand why and how we can address them. 

Our partnership with Jounce Media allows us to classify all our inventory into the Jounce categorizations around site quality and directness. Our advertisers can target using these dimensions via deals and we use Jounce data to remove MFA by default.

A Shared Commitment to Smarter Advertising

At Digilant, we believe that delivering results for our clients starts with working alongside partners who share our values—transparency, innovation, and a relentless focus on performance. Sharethrough exemplifies that standard.

From redefining what it means to offer premium inventory, to prioritizing sustainability, brand safety, and meaningful audience insights, Sharethrough brings real value to the table. Together, we’re helping advertisers cut through the noise and connect with audiences in smarter, more responsible ways.

This collaboration is just one example of how our partner ecosystem is built to drive better outcomes. Stay tuned for more insights in our SSP Partner Series, where we continue to showcase the platforms shaping the future of digital advertising.