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I spent two years running consent management at Paramount before joining Ketch. At Paramount, I was an engineering lead responsible for keeping a consent management platform (CMP) working across hundreds of millions of users and billions of consent events a year. So when people ask what the ROI of Ketch actually is, I don't answer with a case study I read. I answer with a sprint count dedicated to maintaining the business' privacy posture.
Consent management ROI is usually pitched as risk reduction: fewer fines, cleaner audits, less legal exposure. That's real, but it's not the number that shows up first on an engineering roadmap. The number that shows up first is developer time, and specifically, how much of it a CMP consumes just to stay current with privacy law, browser policy, and IAB Frameworks.
That's the ROI conversation nobody puts on the deck. So here it is, from the engineering side.
The SDK is where the ROI conversation actually lives
Most consent management vendors, including our previous one, OneTrust, rely on a software development kit (SDK) embedded directly in the application. When a privacy law changes, when IAB revises its specs, or when a browser changes cookie behavior, that SDK often has to be updated, tested, and redeployed across every platform it touches: web, iOS, Android, connected TV, and anything else in the stack.
Ketch takes a different approach. Consent behavior lives in server-side configuration, not in application code. Framework updates, signal changes, and policy logic get handled on the Ketch side, so the application doesn't need a new SDK release every time the underlying rules change. At Paramount, this is the difference that showed up first, fastest, and most concretely on the engineering side of the ledger.
What one SDK update actually costs
Here's the part that doesn't make it into most vendor comparisons: an SDK update isn't a config change. It's a full engineering cycle.
At Paramount, we consistently budgeted one full sprint, two weeks, for one developer, per SDK update. That's not two weeks of banner testing. A CMP SDK touches nearly every part of the application it's embedded in, so validating a new SDK version means re-testing the application around it, not just the consent experience itself. If something breaks, you're not looking at a quick patch; you're looking at another two-week cycle, now on top of whatever else that sprint was supposed to ship.
That cost repeats every time the SDK needs to move: a new IAB TCF signal revision, a new state privacy law, a new browser policy on cookies or device identifiers. It's a recurring tax on the product roadmap, and it's paid by developers, not by legal or privacy teams.
Eighteen months, zero SDK updates
When we implemented Ketch at Paramount, we were managing consent across brands and platforms generating 3 billion unique consent transactions a year, hundreds of millions of users. That's the scale where an inefficient consent architecture stops being an annoyance and starts being a real drag on engineering velocity.
After migrating from OneTrust to Ketch, we went 18 months without a single SDK update. Roughly 95% of what used to require an SDK release, including IAB framework updates and consent behavior changes, got handled through Ketch configuration instead.
No app release.
No cross-platform coordination.
No regression cycle.
A configuration change, reviewed and deployed, without touching application code.
That's the number I'd put in front of any engineering team evaluating a CMP: not a percentage improvement, but an absence. Eighteen months where a task that used to consume a developer for two weeks at a time didn't happen.
Why configuration changes skip the QA cycle that SDK updates require
Let's be specific about the mechanism, not just the outcome. (This is the part that matters most to engineers.)
A CMP SDK is embedded in the application itself. Updating it changes code that runs inside your app, which means the blast radius of that change includes everything the app does, not just the consent banner. That's why SDK updates require full regression testing: you're not validating a feature, you're re-validating the application.
Ketch configuration changes don't touch application code. The application continues running the same integration it always has; what changes is the behavior Ketch enforces on the server side and pushes down through that integration. Because the application layer stays untouched, a configuration change doesn't require the same QA blast radius as a code change. You're validating a configuration, not re-testing an app.
That distinction is the actual mechanism behind the ROI, not a marketing claim layered on top of it.
What this looked like against OneTrust, specifically
I want to name this directly, because vague comparisons don't help engineering teams evaluate anything. At Paramount, our prior CMP was OneTrust, and the SDK update cycle described above is what we lived with on that platform: every IAB framework revision or consent-behavior change meant a new SDK version, a two-week sprint, and a full regression pass before it could ship.
That's not unique to OneTrust. It's a structural consequence of any CMP architecture that initially puts consent logic and experiences inside an SDK rather than behind server-side configuration. If your CMP requires an SDK update every time privacy law or the IAB framework moves, you're paying the two-week tax described above, repeatedly, for the life of that integration.
Calculating your own SDK tax
If you're evaluating a CMP and want to know what this is actually costing your team, the math can be expressed as:
(Number of SDK updates per year) × (2 weeks per developer, per update) × (developer cost per week)
Then add the opportunity cost: what wasn't shipped during those sprints, and what the privacy and legal review cycle cost on top of the engineering time. That's the number that belongs in an ROI conversation, and it's the number that's easiest to verify, because your own release history already has it.
The actual value proposition
Here's how I put it to the marketing team when they asked me to write this: moving to Ketch means an engineering team gets to spend its time on the product problems it was hired to solve, because Ketch is handling privacy for them. For us that's been 18 months without touching the SDK, at 3 billion consent transactions a year.
If your team is still budgeting a sprint every time your CMP needs an update, that's the conversation worth having next.
