By Jon Walsh, co-founder of JobsinAdtech.com
I read this piece by Dan Gilbert recently and I get where the frustration with the programmatic ecosystem comes from. Anyone who has spent time in programmatic has had moments where it feels messy, overcomplicated, and harder to explain than it should be.
But calling the whole thing a swamp that needs draining feels a bit lazy. It is a strong line, but it skips over a lot of the reality people actually deal with day to day.
Of course it is messy. Look at what it is doing. Programmatic is trying to connect buyers and sellers across formats, across markets, in real time, at scale. That was never going to be simple.
You do not build something like that and end up with a clean, tidy system. The complexity is part of the trade-off. It is the price you pay for scale and speed.
That does not mean everything is fine. There is still plenty of nonsense in the ecosystem. But it does mean that “burn it down” is not a serious answer to a very real, very complicated system.
This is not 2016 anymore
Some of the criticism feels like it is stuck in the past. There were real issues, and they were not small ones either. Hidden fees, lack of transparency, and practices that rightly got called out.
But the industry did respond. Buyers are sharper now. Supply paths are tighter. There is more visibility than there used to be. It is not perfect, but it is also not the chaos people still like to describe. A lot of progress has been made, even if it is not always acknowledged.
No one ever says what replaces it. This is the bit that always seems to get avoided. If programmatic is that broken, what are we actually replacing it with?
Going back to manual buying does not scale. Leaning fully into walled gardens brings a different set of problems and even less transparency. Contextual has its place, but it is not enough on its own.
There is no obvious alternative sitting there ready to take over. So when people say “drain the swamp,” it sounds good, but it does not really hold up when you push it a bit further.
Some of this is on us
Not all of the issues sit with programmatic itself. A lot of it comes down to how it gets used.
There is still a tendency to chase cheap CPMs over actual outcomes. There are setups that are more complicated than they need to be. And there are situations where people accept things they do not fully understand.
Those behaviours do not magically disappear if you change the system. They just show up somewhere else.
Another point to consider is that, despite everything, programmatic works. This is the part people do not always say out loud. For all the complaints, programmatic works.
It delivers scale. It moves quickly. It connects channels in a way that would be incredibly difficult to manage manually. That is why it is still here, and why it continues to grow. If it was truly broken, it would not be as central to how media is bought and sold today.
Anyone can say something is broken. It is much harder to actually improve it in practice. That means making better decisions, cutting out unnecessary layers, and asking tougher questions about how things are set up and why.
It is not the most exciting answer, but it is the honest one. Programmatic is not perfect, and no one seriously thinks it is. At the same time, it is not something you can just wipe out and replace overnight. It is the system the industry runs on today, and it is still evolving.
The focus should be on making it better, not pretending we can start again from scratch.
