Well, well, well, it looks like the rush to access publishers’ advertising inventory directly – without going through the black boxes called programmatic ad buying – appears to be getting traction.

Or at least lip service. More and more players in that world, from Google on down, seem to acknowledge that programmatic ads hurt news sites, particularly local news sites which don’t have and never will have the scale and reach of national platforms.

This is important for political ad buyers. It means that some firms will be able to access the ad placements they want on key publishers with more certainty. But it also means change in the market could wreak havoc for smaller or episodic buyers.

Spot-On doesn’t put a lot of faith in Google saying it no longer wants to control every aspect of digital ad buying. They didn’t get to be a trillion-dollar company by playing nice. Nor do we think that buying scenarios like the ones spelled out by Trade Desk for its Open Path offering are going to help political ad buyers very much. Open Path feels more like a challenge to a new weakness in Google’s ecosytem and market dominance.

Still, we think there are several trends here to notice – just not the ones being touted from the rooftops. And yeah, we do think they’ll have an impact in November.

So, let’s start with Google’s ideas about allowing advertisers to target their ads based on their perceived interest in topics users explore on the web. This strategy is more general than the cookie-based targeting political advertisers rely on to match voters to ads. And it raises a question. Is a reader interested in political subjects nothing more than a political insider or influencer? That’s not a swing voter; that’s the base. And what about lag time? Google’s idea uses hindsight and elections – and the events leading up to them – can change fast.

Then there’s the big ad agency race to claim control over quality advertising. Putting aside Trade Desk (which is hard, it’s as big a player in the market as Facebook or Google), other agencies are trying to secure high quality inventory on known outlets for their own by cutting access deals with publishers to replace cookie-based tracking. The result is that the market is in danger of being split between the “have access” and “want access.”

Here’s the take from DigiDay’s reporter:

“Put simply, fewer third-party cookies means less granular data and the less there is of that the fewer people advertisers can track and reach in the open web.

“The more this happens, the more divided the market will get: on one side there will be a larger portion of high-quality ad inventory powered by first-party data and consent; on the other side, there’s a long tail of poorly targeted impressions far more susceptible to fraud and manipulation.”

So, if you regularly run high profile national campaigns – if your clients are victorious presidential campaigns or Super PACs, you’ll be fine. The rest of political ad buyers may well be out in the cold. No targeting, no access and precious little inventory to snap up at the last minute.

There are some things that Spot-On likes about this trend. We have long maintained that political and advocacy advertising has no place on blind programmatic exchanges. No one’s happy with the current situation. Buyers don’t know where their ads are running; sellers don’t know who’s buying or what the ads are saying. And compliance with the law isn’t equitable.

And we’re stepping in to do our part. Starting this week, we’re opening up our Pinpoint Persuasion Automated Direct Buying platform to customers. Our introductory offer will be in your email shortly. But if you hate lines, feel free to give us a shout. We’ll give you access and information about more than 4000 local news sites across the county, as well as let you search by zip code and election districts. And that’s just for starters. We’re loading up census and other data as fast as we can think of ways to use it.

So, beat the crowd. Get an account and start buying political ads on Pinpoint Persuasion, a platform built by political people for political people.