Rent vs. Build: When Should Publishers Build Their Own Ad Sales CRM and OMS? 

CRMs and order management systems (OMS) are the backbone of advertising operations for publishers and media companies. These systems unify ad sales, streamline workflows, and manage relationships with advertising agencies and brands.

The rise of media-focused customer relationship management and order management systems has made it easier for publishers to gain instant access to key features and functionalities to power their ad sales.

However, while there are numerous off-the-shelf solutions available on the market, many companies are turning to custom-built solutions to help deliver the next phase of growth.

In this article, we look at the signs that a publisher or media company may be outgrowing its existing software, when custom development starts to make sense, and what to consider when evaluating the rent vs build decision.

What does an ad sales CRM and order management platform actually do?

Ad sales CRMs and order management systems help publisher and media companies automate manual tasks associated with selling their ad inventory.

An ad sales CRM helps manage the relationship and sales opportunities publisher and media companies have with brands and ad agencies, while an OMS manages the planning, booking, and billing of media campaigns.

Just like with every other piece of advertising technology, an ad sales CRM and OMS integrate with other platforms and tools to activate the campaigns, deliver the ads, and report on the performance of the media campaigns.

The role of an ad sales CRM and order management system is to:

• Manage the processes involved in selling and delivering their advertising products.
• Support the entire workflow from the initial sales opportunity to campaign booking, delivery, reporting, and invoicing.
• Manage advertiser and agency relationships, create quotes and proposals, define pricing, and turn opportunities into confirmed orders.
• Coordinate the handover from sales to ad operations and manage the information needed to set up and deliver the campaign.
• Connect with other systems across the publisher’s technology stack, such as ad servers and supply-side platforms (SSPs).

Signs that you’ve outgrown your current systems

Off-the-shelf platforms are designed to meet the needs of many different publishers and media companies, which is also what can eventually become their limitation.

As your advertising business evolves, the gap between how the platform was designed to work and how your business actually operates can start to grow.

Below are 7 signs you’ve outgrown your third-party ad sales CRM and order management system.

1. Customising the platform is becoming a continuous requirement

Most off-the-shelf ad sales CRMs and order management systems can be configured or customised to accommodate specific requirements and workflows.

But there is a difference between occasionally adapting a platform and continuously modifying it to keep up with your business’s growth.

If new products, workflows or requirements regularly result in change requests, additional development or vendor support, you may have reached a point where you are effectively building around someone else’s product.

The question then becomes whether it would make more sense to build the underlying platform itself so that you have the freedom, control, and flexibility to shape the technology around your business, not the other way around.

2. Your advertising business has become more complex

Your CRM and OMS may have provided you with all the features and functionalities you required when your advertising operations were relatively straightforward, but now that your advertising business is growing, these same features are limiting your growth.

You might now sell across more channels, offer direct IOs and programmatic sales, operate across multiple markets, or manage increasingly complex inventory, pricing, and approval processes.

As these requirements become more specific to your business, it can become harder for an off-the-shelf platform to accommodate them efficiently.

3. Your integration requirements are increasing

Ad sales platforms rarely operate in isolation. They may need to connect with ad servers, SSPs, CRM and ERP systems, finance software, data platforms, and BI tools.

Standard integrations may cover many of these requirements, but if you increasingly need custom integrations with various advertising and data platforms, then you might find that off-the-shelf software doesn’t provide you with the integration capabilities you require for growth and new opportunities.

4. Your technology roadmap increasingly depends on your vendor

Using a third-party platform means giving up some control over how the underlying technology evolves.

With an off-the-shelf platform, the vendor ultimately decides which features, integrations and capabilities it develops and when they are released.

This isn’t necessarily a problem when your priorities align, but if launching new products or improving important workflows regularly depends on feature requests or future releases, that dependency can start to restrict how quickly you innovate.

For publishers and media companies whose advertising technology is becoming strategically important, this dependency can increasingly restrict how quickly they can respond to new opportunities.

5. The cost of adapting the platform is becoming harder to justify

The cost of an off-the-shelf platform often extends beyond the subscription itself.

Most tools have costs associated with customisation, integrations, change and feature requests, additional modules, and ongoing support.

Then there are the less visible costs of adapting your business to the software:

• Manual processes
• Workarounds
• Duplicate data entry
• Additional tools

But there is also an opportunity cost.

If a technology limitation delays launching new inventory, prevents a process from being automated, or requires employees to spend hours performing repetitive tasks, that has an economic impact even if it doesn’t appear on the software invoice.

6. Performance or scalability is becoming a constraint

As your advertising business grows, so too do the demands placed on the systems supporting it.

More campaigns, inventory types, users, partners, and data can result in significantly greater processing and reporting requirements.

If slow reporting, processing limitations or other performance issues are starting to affect day-to-day operations, consider whether the platform can support not only your requirements today, but where you expect the business to be in several years.

7. You want greater control over automation and AI

AI and automation are increasingly being incorporated into commercial AdTech platforms, so adopting them doesn’t necessarily require custom software.

The question is how much control you need.

Automating workflows across sales, order management, campaign delivery, reporting and finance requires reliable access to data and the ability to interact with multiple systems.

If your automation or AI strategy is constrained by the data, APIs or functionality your existing vendors make available, owning more of the underlying technology can give you greater freedom to build automation around your specific processes.

Also, an often overlooked, but critical, aspect of adopting and implementing AI in software is data governance and security.

If a vendor has incorporated AI into their tech and you’re ingesting your first-party and campaign data into it, then you’re unknowingly allowing your valuable data to train AI models and systems that you’re not aware of and have no control over.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with using your first-party data to power AI models (in fact, this is very common); the issue is around governance and control. This is hard, almost impossible to establish and monitor, if you’re not the one building or operating the AI models.

When does building a custom solution start to make sense?

Experiencing one or two limitations with an off-the-shelf platform doesn’t necessarily mean you should replace it.

In many cases, configuring the existing CRM or OMS, adding an integration or requesting new functionality will still be faster and more cost-effective than building your own solution.

The case for custom development becomes stronger when the limitations are no longer isolated problems, but start affecting how you operate, innovate, and grow.

Building your own platform may make sense when:

• Your workflows are highly specific to your business: You need functionality and processes that would require extensive customisation of an off-the-shelf product.
• Technology is limiting commercial opportunities: Launching new products, entering new markets or changing how you sell advertising is constrained by what your existing platform supports.
• You need greater control over your roadmap: Important technology decisions increasingly depend on the priorities and development timelines of your vendor.
• Your integration and data requirements are becoming more complex: You need greater control over how systems communicate and how data moves across your advertising stack.
• The economics are changing: The combined cost of licences, customisation, integrations, workarounds and operational inefficiencies is becoming harder to justify.
• You want to make automation a core capability: Your plans for AI and automation require deeper access to data, APIs and workflows than your existing technology provides.

Ultimately, the decision comes down to how strategically important the platform has become.

If it primarily supports standard processes that can be handled effectively by existing products, buying and configuring software may remain the better option.

But if the platform sits at the centre of how you sell advertising, connect your technology, use your data and develop new products, greater ownership can become increasingly valuable.

At that point, custom development isn’t simply about replacing software that doesn’t work; it is about gaining greater control over technology that has become critical to your advertising business.

What should you consider when evaluating the rent vs. build decision?

Deciding whether to continue using an off-the-shelf platform or build your own shouldn’t come down to a simple comparison between subscription fees and development costs.

Both approaches have advantages, costs, and risks that need to be considered over the long term.

Here are some of the key questions to consider.

How well does the existing platform fit your requirements?

Start by separating genuine platform limitations from issues that could be solved through configuration or customisation.

Which requirements can the existing platform support today? Which require workarounds or custom development? And which can’t be supported at all?

If the platform already meets most of your requirements, extending it may make more sense than replacing it. If the gap is substantial and continues to grow, building becomes a more credible option.

What is the true cost of your current setup?

Look beyond the subscription fee and calculate the total cost of operating your existing environment. This could include licences, customisation, integrations, support, additional tools, internal engineering resources, and the time employees spend on manual processes and workarounds.

Compare this with the total cost of building and operating a custom platform over several years.

How much control do you need?

Consider how important it is to control your workflows, data, integrations, architecture, and development roadmap.

If the platform supports an important but relatively standard business function, renting may be perfectly adequate. If it increasingly determines how you sell advertising, launch products, automate processes, or differentiate your offering, ownership may become more strategically valuable.

What would you actually need to build?

Choosing custom software doesn’t necessarily mean recreating every feature of your existing platform.

Map your current workflows and identify which capabilities genuinely need to be proprietary. Commodity functionality may still be better provided by third-party tools, while the processes that differentiate your advertising business can be custom-built.

The decision can therefore be rent and build, rather than simply rent or build.

Are you prepared to own the technology?

Owning the software also means owning responsibility for it.

You will need to consider ongoing development, infrastructure, security, monitoring, maintenance, support, documentation, integrations, and technical debt. You also need access to the people and expertise required to maintain and evolve the platform over the long term.

The benefits of greater control therefore need to justify the additional responsibility that comes with ownership.

What will your requirements look like in three to five years?

Finally, don’t make the decision based only on today’s problems.

Consider how your advertising business is likely to evolve: new channels, markets, products, programmatic capabilities, integrations, data requirements, and AI-driven workflows could all change what you need from the platform.

The best option isn’t necessarily the one that solves your current requirements at the lowest cost. It’s the one that provides the strongest foundation for where you expect the business to go next.