Association of National Advertisers

The ANA is the trade body for the buy side. Its members are the brands that pay for advertising — Procter & Gamble, Unilever, General Motors, Mars, the financial-services and retail and CPG giants whose annual marketing budgets, taken together, fund the entire ad ecosystem. That seat at the table matters because the other big advertising trade bodies sit on the opposite side of the same transaction. The Interactive Advertising Bureau and its standards arm, IAB Tech Lab, represent the digital media owners, the ad-tech vendors, the SSPs and DSPs and verification companies. The 4A’s represents the agencies. The ANA is the only one of the major bodies whose seat is reserved for the people writing the checks.

That alignment is the reason its programmatic transparency work landed harder than the same critique would have from any other quarter. The December 2023 Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study — built on log-level data from 21 of its own member advertisers, not industry surveys — concluded that only 36 cents of every programmatic dollar reaches the consumer, leaving roughly $22 billion a year in efficiency gains on the table in the open-web market. The “$22 billion” framing is now standard buy-side shorthand for the cost of opaque supply paths, and the Q2 2025 follow-up benchmark updated that number to $26.8 billion as private-marketplace dominance and CTV’s share of programmatic both expanded.

The body is in transition. On April 22, 2026, the ANA announced that CEO Bob Liodice — 31 years at the organization, 23 of them in the top job — will step down at the end of 2026. Whoever replaces him inherits an organization whose center of gravity has shifted from traditional advertising advocacy into supply-chain audit, identity and measurement reform, and increasingly AI governance — all from the buy-side perch that distinguishes the ANA from every other major trade body in the ecosystem.