Yeah, same when I was working for Nature. Website was super fast, but then we had to load the (many) ad scripts that the sales team wanted and you’d add 2+ seconds to your page load time.
No way to win. At least I could wrap all the ad locations so they didn’t shift the page when they finally popped in.
I've been in the same situation, and it's one of the few times I've appreciated the bureaucracy and red tape that come with being at a Fortune 500 company. Whenever the sales team comes to me asking for another tracking pixel, I just say "We'll be happy to add this once you've submitted the necessary paperwork and it undergoes the the company-mandated security, privacy, and legal reviews". 90% of the time, I never hear back from them again.
Yeaaaaap. I ended up implementing a library for Newsweek that converted document.write ad units into async writes. I'm still amazed that worked, and that ads used to use document.write.
No way to win. At least I could wrap all the ad locations so they didn’t shift the page when they finally popped in.