TV agency Marketing Architects shares an inside look at how Annika, its proprietary DSP, tackles streaming's most persistent challenges nearly three years after launch.

TV advertising agency Marketing Architects shares how Annika^®, the agency's homegrown DSP, has evolved since the public launch of its Connected TV capabilities in 2023. Inventory volume has nearly doubled in the last 12 months alone, and Annika's footprint now includes OTT and international markets.

Streaming TV advertising has matured, but the industry still faces challenges costing advertisers millions. Frequency waste, inventory quality concerns, and over-reliance on a narrow set of sources remain common. This is partly because most DSPs are built to spend. Annika was built in-house to prioritize performance, and that distinction shapes every technical decision Marketing Architects makes.

Frequency management is one area where that difference is most visible. Streaming TV has a well-documented problem with IP-level over-exposure. Certain households can absorb hundreds of impressions from a single campaign. Annika's frequency controls are built to catch this before it becomes waste, cutting overexposed households out of the buy and keeping reach distributed evenly across a campaign. Clients using the updated frequency controls have seen more than a 70% reduction in the number of IPs seeing high frequency.

Annika also enforces diversity rules across streaming app sources. The controls set budget caps by source, ensuring spend is distributed across top-performing apps while preventing any single partner from dominating a buy. This makes campaign delivery more resilient without sacrificing performance.

Beyond those controls, Annika handles increasingly specialized use cases. The DSP supports geo-targeted campaigns at the location and zip code level, each with individual budgets and unique creatives. Combined with expanded support for OTT inventory and campaigns outside the US, Annika serves a growing range of advertiser needs. Response time has dropped to three milliseconds, giving Annika the speed to react to performance data as it comes in.

"What we've built in Annika is a comprehensive system that challenges the assumptions baked into how most DSPs operate," says Aaron Lange, Chief Technology Officer at Marketing Architects. "When we see frequency spiking at a specific IP or spend concentrating too heavily in one source, Annika responds instantly. That flexibility is only possible because we built her with performance accountability at the core. We aren’t constrained by the same infrastructure as other DSPs."

"Streaming TV looks different today than it did just a few years ago," adds Catherine Walstad, Chief Media Officer at Marketing Architects. "Viewing habits have shifted and the publisher landscape has changed. Annika’s designed to keep up with those changes by surfacing things most buyers aren't looking for until they become a problem."

Annika buys media for Marketing Architects clients across linear TV, Connected TV (CTV), and Over-the-Top (OTT) campaigns.

About Marketing Architects

Marketing Architects is an All-Inclusive TV agency that helps brands get more out of TV advertising. Founded in Minneapolis, Marketing Architects has spent 30 years building homegrown technology to solve TV's pricing, measurement, and scale challenges. Learn more at marketingarchitects.com.

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"What we've built in Annika is a comprehensive system that challenges the assumptions baked into how most DSPs operate."