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The Funnel Distortion Nobody Talks About
Programmatic advertising has turned into the equivalent of a Silicon Valley juice cleanse: expensive, overhyped, and everyone swears it’s working while quietly wondering why they still feel like garbage. The dirty truth? Your dashboards look amazing because the algorithms are gaming you, not helping you.
Marketers brag about CPMs like they’re bragging about gas prices. “We got it down to $1.12!” Congratulations. You also bought yourself an audience of bots, bored teenagers, and people who haven’t purchased anything online since dial-up. The funnel isn’t healthy; it’s on life support, propped up by vanity metrics no CFO in their right mind actually cares about.
The CPM Mirage
The Illusion of Cheap Reach
CPM has become the industry’s favorite sugar high. Lower is always better, right? Wrong.
Low CPM ≠ Value. That bargain inventory is usually the stuff no one else wanted. It’s the advertising equivalent of gas-station sushi.
Big Reach, No Impact. You reached a ton of people, but they weren’t your people. It’s like running a Michelin-starred restaurant ad in Cat Fancy.
The ugly secret: platforms shove cheap inventory at you because that’s what you told them to optimize for. And you fall for it because the math looks clean on a PowerPoint slide.
CTR: The Click Bait Trap
CTR is where otherwise smart marketers go to die. It’s the shiny object that convinces you clicks equal progress.
The Problem with Optimizing for Clicks
Clickers aren’t buyers. They’re just people with too much time, too little judgment, or both.
Your creative mutates. Suddenly it’s not about persuasion or brand—it’s about cheap tricks to spike CTR. Think “10 Weird Hacks” headlines instead of meaningful storytelling.
Reports look great. Until you ask the only question that matters: did it drive incremental sales? Spoiler: it didn’t.
CTR is Tinder for ads—lots of swipes, no relationships.
Viewability: The Polished Delusion
Marketers love viewability because it feels like quality. Ninety percent viewable! Ninety-five percent viewable! Who cares?
The Fine Print No One Mentions
High viewability = shrinking reach. The algorithm just keeps hammering the same handful of users over and over.
Viewability ≠ Attention. If it did, you’d remember every banner ad you ignored while doom-scrolling.
Tradeoff Hell. You want both CTR and viewability? Good luck. The machine will give you one at the expense of the other, and you’ll call it a “tradeoff” when really it’s just failure dressed up in a suit.
Viewability makes dashboards look like they’ve been polished with Windex, but underneath, it’s still garbage.
Funnel on Life Support
Here’s what happens when you let algorithms drive:
Budgets get sucked into retargeting fumes.
New audiences dry up because discovery looks “too expensive.”
Your funnel shrinks until it’s just a hamster wheel of retargeted clicks from customers who were already going to buy.
The treadmill effect: you’re sweating, the numbers look impressive, but you’re still in the same spot.
The Incentive Problem
This isn’t happening by accident. It’s structural.
Platforms do what you tell them. You say CPM, they find CPM. You say CTR, they find clickers. They’re not optimizing for your business—they’re optimizing to keep you feeding quarters into the slot machine.
Vendors get paid regardless. No one’s comp is tied to incrementality. They make money whether you do or not.
Marketers settle for the mirage. Why ask the hard questions when the dashboards make you look good in front of the boss?
It’s not a conspiracy. It’s worse—it’s inertia.
Setting Up the Series
This is just the warm-up act. If you’ve ever stared at a report that screamed “success” while your sales team whispered “failure,” you already know what funnel distortion feels like.
Coming up:
Why “dumb” media buys sometimes beat your shiny algorithm.
How to test incrementality without being gamed.
The sleight-of-hand tricks—bid floors, post-bid contamination—that vendors will never bring up at a client dinner.
Because until you understand how your funnel is being bent out of shape, you’ll never be able to fix it. And the industry will keep cashing your checks while handing you dashboards that sparkle but don’t sell.
So yeah, keep bragging about your $1 CPMs. Just don’t act surprised when your CFO asks why revenue hasn’t moved since last quarter.
The Rabbi of ROAS
When Dumb Buys Beat Smart Machines
For years, adtech has been promising us the holy grail: real-time bidding so precise it can practically read your DNA and serve you an ad for a cold brew before you even crave caffeine. Dashboards glow with micro-optimizations, machines flex their “intelligence,” and every vendor swears the algorithm knows your customer better than your own mother.
Here’s the problem: sometimes the dumb, “wasteful,” broad buys outperform all that machine precision. And that makes the experts nervous, because it undercuts the entire story they’ve been selling.
Broad Reach vs. Hyper-Granular Targeting
Algorithms are surgeons. They carve away “waste” with scalpel-like precision, sculpting a narrow little audience that looks perfect on paper. The problem? Surgeons don’t create life—they just cut things up.
Over-narrowing = lost growth. The algorithm hunts people who look exactly like your last buyers and ignores everyone else. That means no new audiences, no serendipity, no discovery.
Broad buys = oxygen. Buying an FM radio run, a daytime TV slot, or broad-tier CTV inventory may look like waste, but often sparks incremental growth. People outside your neat lookalike model discover you. And sometimes, that “waste” is where the actual lift lives.
Discovery matters. A campaign optimized to only hit the same model buyers is like a band that only plays its greatest hits to the same crowd. Broad reach buys bring in new fans—the ones who will keep you alive.
Intuition Finds Hidden Pockets
Legacy buyers—the ones machines were supposed to replace—still do things that look “irrational” but work.
Context over code. Sponsoring a cultural tentpole, buying around a sports event, or front-loading inventory during a news cycle—moves that a dashboard would never greenlight.
The hunch factor. A seasoned buyer knows when a daytime slot hits stay-at-home parents or when a podcast sponsorship sparks word-of-mouth in a niche community. Algorithms can’t “feel” culture, they only react to the past.
Planned serendipity. By taking what look like “dumb” risks, human buyers open doors algorithms never consider. That serendipity is often what creates breakthrough brand lift.
Translation: Machines see data. Humans see context. And context still matters.
The Set-It-and-Forget-It Trap
Smart machines, left alone, become lazy.
Optimization loops. The algorithm keeps fishing in the same pond, serving the same creative to the same audience because it looks efficient.
Shrinking reach. Over time, you’re just hammering the same users, while ignoring whole swaths of potential customers.
Diminishing returns. Without human intervention, the campaign spirals into fatigue—your CPMs creep up, your reach erodes, and your CFO wonders why the hell you’re paying so much for repeat impressions.
Automation without oversight is like autopilot with no pilot—it works great until it doesn’t.
Manual Isn’t Old-Fashioned—It’s Essential
Positioning human decision-making as “old school” is the industry’s biggest lie. Manual oversight is not nostalgia, it’s survival.
Humans can challenge the algorithm when it gets too tight.
Humans can test broad plays the machine refuses to consider.
Humans can inject creative bets when dashboards flatline.
The highest-performing campaigns blend automation with intuition. They use machines for efficiency, but humans for exploration.
The Future: Dumb is the New Smart
The future of buying isn’t a battle between algorithms and intuition. It’s knowing when to override the algorithm with a “dumb” move that’s actually smarter.
Because here’s the secret the dashboards won’t tell you: incremental growth often hides in the “waste” that machines are trained to avoid.
And if you’re too obsessed with looking efficient, you’ll never find it.
Sidebar: Skye Frontier on the Incrementality Mirage
Skye Frontier, incrementality expert at Incremental, doesn’t claim most tests are outright rigged. The bigger issue, he argues, is a lack of transparency. Synthetic test designs have become black boxes where outcomes can be engineered without scrutiny. “That’s why measurement should never be controlled by the sell side,” he says. His team only works directly with advertisers to avoid incentives warping the math.
On the value debate, Frontier is clear: proxy metrics are worthless. Fifteen years of research across multiple firms show clicks and click-based attribution don’t map to real business growth. If you want growth, measure growth. The drag on speed and cost comes from legacy providers stuck on old service-heavy models. SaaS has made lift measurement cheaper and faster — but industry inertia is the choke point.
Blind spots? Take your pick: retargeting pools, branded search overlap, post-bid contamination. The real risk, he warns, is pushing those caveats off until the results roll in — and suddenly your deck is covered in asterisks. The fix isn’t magic. It’s radical transparency about trade-offs upfront.
What You’re Missing in ADOTAT+
The Training Session They Don’t Want You to See
While “educators” charge $5K to recycle our charts, ADOTAT+ members get the real playbook. The unprinted manual for bid adjustments, floor traps, and contamination defense that separates signal from vendor theater.
Inside ADOTAT+:
How experts throttle bids on converters and push spend to audiences that actually lift.
The bid floor scam vendors never mention—ghost bids and simulations that reveal inflated results.
Real-time defense against fraud, geo drift, and pixel leaks poisoning your tests.
The unpublished checklist the best buyers use to prove every dollar is incremental.
Don’t settle for dashboards that sparkle but don’t sell. This is the training session for the ages—read it before your competitors do.
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