If you’re looking for a programmatic consultant in Canada who has actually run sell-side systems — not audited them from a spreadsheet — that’s the practice. Marcus and Muse’s ad tech consulting arm applies two decades inside the programmatic supply chain, including building and running supply at Sharethrough and Samsung Ads, to the problems that quietly erode publisher revenue: leakage, fill gaps, bid latency, misconfigured wrappers, opaque resellers, and streaming inventory that monetizes below its worth.
We work for media owners only. Publishers, broadcasters, streaming platforms, FAST channel operators, and DOOH networks. If you’re a head of ad ops, director of programmatic, or CRO, this page explains what we take on, how we diagnose, and what an engagement costs — pricing included, because posted pricing saves us both a discovery call that goes nowhere.
What problems does sell-side ad tech consulting take on?
The practice covers five areas, each with its own dedicated service page:
- Yield and revenue leakage. Money you’ve earned that never lands: unsold impressions, discrepancies between systems, fee take you can’t account for, and floors set by folklore instead of data. Start with publisher ad revenue optimization.
- Supply chain hygiene. Your ads.txt, sellers.json, and schain declarations are the public record of who sells your inventory. When they’re wrong — and in our experience they usually are, somewhere — buyers’ SPO filters punish you silently. See ads.txt and sellers.json audits.
- Header bidding performance. Timeout tuning, bidder mix, wrapper version drift, and the auction dynamics that determine whether Prebid is earning its complexity. Covered under Prebid and header bidding optimization.
- Streaming and FAST monetization. Ad pod construction, SSAI supply declarations, demand routing, and the fill-versus-CPM tradeoffs unique to CTV. Detailed on streaming and FAST monetization.
- DOOH supply integration. Getting screen networks properly represented in programmatic pipes — SSP selection, deal architecture, and the mapping quirks of venue-based inventory. See DOOH SSP integration.
If your problem spans several of these — most do — this hub engagement is where it starts.
How do we diagnose? Audit first, always
Every engagement begins with evidence, because sell-side problems are rarely where the symptom shows up. Fill dropped on one SSP; the cause was a wrapper timeout change three months earlier. CPMs sagged; the cause was a sellers.json entry a buyer’s SPO logic stopped trusting.
The audit looks at four layers:
- Logs. Ad server delivery data, SSP-side reporting, and wrapper analytics, reconciled against each other. Discrepancy between layers is itself a finding.
- Public declarations. ads.txt / app-ads.txt, sellers.json, and observed schain objects, cross-checked for consistency. This is the layer buyers’ algorithms read, whether or not you do.
- Wrapper and ad server configuration. Prebid (or your wrapper of choice) settings, line item architecture, price granularity, timeout and refresh logic.
- Auction dynamics. Bid rates, bid density, timeout rates, and win-rate distribution by bidder — the behavioural layer that config files can’t show you.
The output is a prioritized findings document: what’s costing you money, what it will take to fix, and in what order. No sixty-slide deck. A ranked list with evidence attached.
The three patterns we see most in publisher audits
Every audit is different, but three findings recur often enough that we check for them first.
Prebid timeouts that silently favour slow bidders. A timeout set generously “to be safe” doesn’t just add page latency — it changes who wins. Slow bidders that would otherwise time out get to participate, fast bidders lose share, and the auction quietly rebalances toward partners whose infrastructure is worst. In almost every wrapper audit I’ve run, the timeout value was inherited from a years-old default and nobody could say who chose it or why.
sellers.json entries that misdeclare PUBLISHER vs INTERMEDIARY. DSPs increasingly price supply paths, not just impressions. An entity declared as INTERMEDIARY when it should be PUBLISHER — or vice versa, or missing entirely — reads as risk to a buyer’s supply path optimization logic, and bid rates depress with no error message anywhere. It’s one of the few problems in ad tech where the fix is literally editing a JSON file, and one of the most commonly missed.
Reseller sprawl in ads.txt. Publishers accumulate reseller lines the way attics accumulate boxes: every partnership added a few, nobody ever removes any. Each extra hop adds latency and fee take. The audit question is simple and rarely asked: which of these paths delivers demand you cannot reach directly? The honest answer usually shortens the file considerably.
These three alone justify an audit for most publishers. They’re cheap to fix and expensive to leave alone.
What does an engagement look like?
Three phases: audit, roadmap, implementation support. You can stop after any phase — the audit deliverable is designed to be actionable whether or not we do the work together.
| Tier | Scope | Timeline | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hourly | Ad hoc diagnosis, second opinions, vendor evaluation, config review | As needed | $200/hour USD |
| Retainer | Audit, roadmap, and hands-on implementation support; ongoing yield management | 3-month minimum | $5,000/month USD |
The retainer typically breaks down as: month one, audit and findings; month two, roadmap and the highest-priority fixes; month three, implementation support and measurement against the baseline the audit established. After that, some clients keep the retainer for ongoing optimization; others take the roadmap and run it in-house. Both outcomes are fine — the deliverables are built to outlive the engagement.
Pricing is posted because it pre-qualifies leads in both directions. If $5,000 a month is out of range, the hourly tier or a one-off audit may still fit. If your revenue problem is bigger than that number, the math takes care of itself.
Why does supply-side operator experience matter?
Most consultants who serve publishers came up on the buy side or in general management consulting. That shows up in the work: recommendations that read well and configure poorly.
Aaron Foley built and ran supply at Sharethrough and Samsung Ads — an SSP and a CTV ad platform. That means having sat on the other side of your integrations: seen how SSPs actually prioritize publisher requests, how demand partners evaluate supply paths, what makes a bidder deprioritize an account, and which “premium demand” pitches are repackaged open exchange. When we tell you a reseller path adds no unique demand, it’s because we’ve operated the machinery that would know.
Two structural points matter as much as the résumé:
- Independence. No reseller relationships. No revenue-share deals with vendors we recommend. If we suggest an SSP, a wrapper, or a measurement partner, the only party paying us is you.
- Both-sides fluency. Marcus and Muse also runs buy-side programmatic for advertisers as a separate practice. Consulting clients benefit from that indirectly: we see how buyers actually evaluate and filter supply, because we’re in those platforms weekly. Advertisers trust us with budgets; media owners trust us with plumbing. Very few shops can say both.
We’re based in Ottawa and work with Canadian publishers and broadcasters as well as international media owners. Canadian media companies face a specific squeeze — global platform competition, a small direct-sales market, and US-denominated ad tech fees — which makes supply chain efficiency less optional here than almost anywhere.
People also ask
What does a programmatic consultant cost in Canada?
Marcus and Muse posts pricing publicly: $200 USD per hour for ad hoc work, or $5,000 USD per month on retainer with a three-month minimum. Most engagements start with a fixed-scope audit so you know what you’re buying before committing to ongoing work.
How is ad tech consulting different from hiring an agency?
An agency buys media for advertisers. An ad tech consultant works for the media owner — the sell side. The deliverables are diagnostic and structural: supply chain audits, wrapper configuration, SSP and demand path decisions, and monetization strategy, not campaigns or creative.
What does a supply chain audit actually include?
We reconcile your ads.txt or app-ads.txt against your sellers.json entries and observed schain data, map every reseller path, flag misdeclared PUBLISHER versus INTERMEDIARY entries, and identify hops that add latency and fee take without adding unique demand. You get a prioritized fix list, not a slide deck.
Do you work with media owners outside Canada?
Yes. Marcus and Muse is based in Ottawa and works with Canadian publishers and broadcasters, but the supply chain is global and so is the practice. Engagements run remotely across North American and European time zones; pricing is posted in USD for that reason.
Start with a 30-minute diagnostic
The fastest way to find out whether an audit is worth it is to talk through your setup for half an hour. Bring your ads.txt, your wrapper config, or just the symptom that’s bugging you — a fill drop, a CPM sag, a discrepancy nobody can explain — and we’ll tell you where we’d look first. Book the diagnostic directly; no prep required, no pitch deck on our end either.