Why programmatic advertising is forever on the brink

If there were ever a moment for such a reckoning, this is it: marketers, long resigned to the system’’s flaws, are losing patience. Real-time bidding, the lifeblood of programmatic, is running low on both trust and liquidity. And then there’s the latest scandal, which landed like a bomb in the middle of an already shaky industry: revelations that major brands’ ads had appeared alongside child sexual abuse content. The fallout was swift. 

Two clients of one of the largest media agencies cut their programmatic budgets overnight — no audits, no drawn-out deliberations, just an immediate, categorical retreat, said an ad exec, who exchanged anonymity for their knowledge on the matter. 

Under different circumstances, they might have opted for a more measured approach: an internal review, some minor course corrections and a return to business as usual. But this was different. This was the possibility of having funded, however unintentionally, the unthinkable.

That immediate response was understandable. The panic that followed? Less so.

What should have been treated as a serious but contained failure quickly metastasized into yet another existential crisis for programmatic advertising. By now, the cycle is familiar: a scandal erupts, and rather than addressing the specific breach, the entire system is declared rotten, unsalvageable, mere moments from collapse. And yet, collapse never comes. The industry absorbs the blow, reshuffles its defenses and trudges forward, wounded but intact. 

“Marketers have never had a good view of programmatic advertising, but now that skepticism is more palpable than ever,” one industry executive noted.

But to write it off entirely ignores the layers of safeguards already in place: ads.txt, supply path optimization, the slow but steady tightening of ad verification protocols. The deeper problem, as always, is incentives. Ethical advertising isn’t necessarily lucrative advertising. Granted, some companies manage to strike a balance between principles and profits. Others simply follow the money.  

“There’s no question that programmatic, especially Open RTB, still has a perception issue, and it’s largely a problem of the industry’s own making — it’s still a lemon market,” said Ravi Patel, CEO and co-founder of media platform SWYM.ai.

He’s blunt about the state of the market because he, like many others, believes it’s riddled with arbitrage. The model has been consistent for years: buy low, sell high, pocket the difference. First, it was the ad networks. Then, agency trading desks joined in, flipping inventory at a markup. Now, it’s the supply-side platforms and the curators doing the same; flooding the market with duplicate impressions, selling the same ad slot through multiple paths, exploiting inefficiencies at scale. 

The result is a system in which advertisers can never quite pin down what they’re paying for and publishers don’t know what they’re rightly owed. A system where legitimate partners and opportunistic resellers blur together, where transparency remains a theoretical ideal rather than a business imperative. The industry’s leaders like to talk about fixing it. Whether they ever will is another question entirely. 

“In its current form, the programmatic open marketplace is structured to serve the business models of ad tech firms, media agencies, and affiliated consultancies, often at the expense of advertisers, audiences, and media owners,” said Alessandro De Zanche, founder of media consultancy Not Just ADZ. “It has become a religion, an end in itself. Programmatic for programmatic’s sake.”

As long as that reality hangs in the balance, so too will programmatic advertising’s reputation — perpetually suspect, always on trial. 

Fear, after all, is a far more powerful motivator than nuance, particularly in an industry that both thrives on and suffers from it. Marketers don;t spend their morning contemplating bid shading or auction dynamics. But they do live in terror of the screenshot — that unholy pairing of their brand’s ad with toxic content, blasted across social media, triggering the inevitable brand safety spiral.

The irony, of course, is that this loss of faith in programmatic advertising is driving its evolution. The fear of open auctions, exaggerated and justified, is accelerating a transition toward more structured, more expensive, more controlled alternatives like private marketplace agreements, curated marketplaces and programmatic guaranteed deals.

But even these so-called safer options have their shortcomings. Many private marketplace deals, for instance, operate on static domain lists with no performance-driven optimization, making them an inefficient way to allocate ad dollars. And despite their promise of transparency, they too, are subject to the same markup games played in the open market, creating familiar visibility issues.

“What we need to move toward is dynamic, intelligent PMPs—pre-vetted, always-learning environments that apply real-time data to curate inventory, rather than relying on fixed, outdated lists,” said Patel. “The industry’s mistake has been treating Open RTB and private deals as binary choices when the real solution is a smarter approach to shaping the bid stream.”

That’s what makes O’Kelley’s latest venture compelling. It may amount to nothing, or it may amount to everything. If it works, it could signal a future for programmatic that is not defined by a binary choice between open and closed systems, but by how intelligently the programmatic supply chain is managed. 

“Brands and agencies hoped directness through SPO initiatives would satisfy their need for brand safety, but it’s not,” said Lindsey DiGiorgio, CMO at ad tech vendor YieldMo. “This is pushing more to get to the place they need to be. The promise of programmatic isn’t panning out.” 

As news organizations struggle to stay afloat, the broader risk isn’t just to their business models but to an informed society, one where quality journalism is increasingly treated as collateral damage in programmatic’s relentless pursuit of efficiency. 

The question is no longer whether programmatic can work. It’s whether the industry is willing to make it work the right way.