By Daniel Gilbert, CEO, Brainlabs
Large parts of the programmatic ecosystem are a scam, and I don’t mean slightly inefficient or in need of a tidy-up. I mean fundamentally broken at the level of incentives, in a way that most people in the industry either can’t see or won’t say out loud.
Go back to first principles. A publisher has ad space to sell, an advertiser wants to buy it: two parties, one transaction. What actually happened is that an entire industry of middlemen inserted themselves between buyer and seller, each one adding cost, complexity, and a thick layer of obfuscation that makes it nearly impossible to know what you’re paying for or where your ad actually ran. Ad exchanges, demand-side platforms, supply-side platforms, data management platforms, verification vendors, “data enrichment” partners. Layer after layer, each skimming margin and making the whole thing harder to audit.
The pitch was always the same: scale. “We can give you access to MILLIONS of impressions across THOUSANDS of sites!” But scale was never the problem, and the people selling programmatic infrastructure knew it. The problem was always quality, reach, and whether a real person with any intent to buy actually saw your ad in a context where they might care about it.
The so-called data enrichers deserve special attention here, because they represent the rot at its most confident. Many of them are stitching together probabilistic guesses about who users are and what they might buy, dressing it up in a dashboard, and selling it at a premium. “We know this user is a 35-year-old male interested in luxury watches.” No, you don’t: you’re guessing based on a cookie trail and inference logic that would make a statistician cry. Enriching your own first-party data with real behavioral layers is a different conversation entirely, and a legitimate one. But the third-party data bazaar, where everyone claims to “know” your audience based on fragments and assumptions, should make any serious marketer deeply sceptical.
Here’s where the conversation usually goes wrong, though. People hear “programmatic is broken” and assume the answer is to stop buying programmatically, which misunderstands what programmatic actually is. Programmatic is a buying mechanism. It’s plumbing. The plumbing itself can work beautifully when you pump the right things through it: YouTube, CTV, live sports, digital out-of-home, audio, rich video placed on curated publisher lists. That’s real inventory, served to real people, in formats that actually hold attention and influence decisions.
The problem is what happens when a brand says “I want to optimise to CTR and I refuse to pay more than $3.50 CPM.” The inevitable result is a banner ad served below the fold, next to irrelevant content, on a site nobody has heard of. Nobody clicked it, nobody saw it, but the reporting says it was “served” so everyone in the chain gets paid. That’s not programmatic’s fault: that’s the fault of misaligned expectations, vanity metrics, and an industry-wide obsession with cheapness over quality. The fastest route to wasted spend isn’t the technology itself, it’s a buyer who measures success by whether a dashboard turned green rather than whether a real human being was influenced to do anything at all.
Programmatic done right looks completely different: identify the sites you want to run on, define the audiences you want to reach, keep it simple, and stop chasing phantom CPMs. The technology also makes media buying operationally efficient in ways that direct buys at scale simply can’t match, handling partner outreach, reconciliation, finance, and trafficking across dozens of publishers without drowning your team in spreadsheets. Nobody talks about that stuff because it’s boring, but it’s real and it matters.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth for the agency world: some agencies benefit from the swamp. Opaque markups, clawbacks, hidden rebates. The whole point of programmatic was supposed to be transparency and efficiency, and what parts of the ecosystem became instead was a system where the people spending your money have financial incentives that don’t align with yours. The answer isn’t to abandon programmatic and shift everything into social (Meta can be a remarkably efficient way for advertisers to set money on fire if you don’t know what you’re doing either). The answer is to find someone buying your media who actually understands the swamp exists, doesn’t pretend otherwise, and will tell you that a $2 CPM is cheap for a reason.
The swamp won’t drain itself. But you don’t have to wade through it blind.
