The Labyrinth of Middlemen: How Many Ad Tech Hands Can One Dollar Pass Through Before It Reaches a Real Human?

Welcome to the thrilling and completely absurd world of programmatic advertising, where your ad dollars go on a journey so convoluted it makes a Rube Goldberg machine look efficient. You start with one crisp dollar, drop it into the ad-tech vending machine, and by the time it finally lands in front of a human being—if it ever does—it’s more nickel than bill, chipped away by DSPs, SSPs, exchanges, resellers, verification companies, and whatever new acronym-happy middlemen just got funded last quarter.

You'd think this was a design flaw. You’d be wrong. This is the design.

The programmatic ecosystem isn’t some unfortunate side effect of innovation. It’s a multi-billion-dollar toll booth system, where everyone along the way gets to dip their fingers into the budget—ostensibly to “add value,” but in reality, mostly to exist.

🛑 Too Many Tolls, Not Enough Transparency

The way things are going, soon you’ll need a supply chain map for your own ads, just to figure out where the money went. That’s because every intermediary is out here justifying their cut like a sketchy nightclub with a “processing fee” on your credit card bill.

Andy Dhanik, who’s seen more of ad tech’s underbelly than most, lays it out plain:

“The problem isn’t that fraud exists—it’s that fraud is tolerated. No one wants to fix it because too many people profit from the inefficiencies.”

And that, folks, is the whole game. The more complicated the supply path, the more plausible deniability for why half your ad budget disappeared into what can only be described as the Bermuda Triangle of digital marketing.

Matt Sattel, now CRO at OpenX, has been staring into this abyss for years. “At MIQ, we were actually analyzing supply paths, looking at who the good and bad players were, and making decisions based on data. Then I got to OpenX and realized… that’s not how most people are doing it.”

Instead, he found that the industry is still doing what it does best—pretending to optimize while really just optimizing their own margins.

📉 The Hidden Costs of Programmatic’s Toll Booths

Imagine paying for a five-star meal and receiving a greasy fast-food burger that was microwaved three times. That’s programmatic. You expect your budget to buy premium media, but instead, it's been sliced, diced, and distributed across an entire ecosystem of value-extracting, ROI-destroying intermediaries before a single ad even appears.

• DSPs say they’re optimizing, but they’re really just running whatever settings make them the most money.

• SSPs claim they provide “premium inventory,” yet plenty of garbage sneaks in.

• Verification companies are like mall cops in a zombie apocalypse—pretending they have control while the real threats keep multiplying.

• Data providers keep selling the same “exclusive” audiences to multiple clients, because why not?

Dhanik didn’t mince words: “The amount of hands in the cookie jar is insane. Some companies exist just to move data around like it’s a black market economy. No one asks questions, and everyone’s getting paid.”

And here’s the kicker: Advertisers enable this mess by not demanding better. If brands actually pulled back the curtain, they’d see a supply chain so bloated it makes the Pentagon’s budget look lean.

🚨 The MFA Problem: Junk Food for Your Ad Budget

If the ad supply chain were a diet, MFA (Made-for-Advertising) inventory would be the processed sugar bomb that rots your ROI from the inside out.

These are sites that exist for one reason only: to hoover up ad dollars while providing zero real human engagement. They’re built not for consumers but for ad algorithms to mistake them for valuable inventory.

• Clickbait headlines? Check.

• Autoplay videos with no sound? Check.

• The kind of content a half-asleep AI would generate? Absolutely.

And yet, for years, agencies shoveled money into these pits because the numbers looked good on a spreadsheet. High click-through rates! Incredible viewability! And all about as real as a Hollywood marriage.

Matt Sattel laid it bare: “The only thing that gets hurt by removing MFA are vanity metrics. Your actual business outcomes don’t suffer. But try telling that to a media buyer who’s getting judged on their click-through rate.”

And there it is—the ugly truth. This industry is still rewarding the wrong KPIs, so nothing changes.

💰 CTV and the Scatter Market: The New Gold Rush (or Just Another Land Grab?)

CTV is where the money is heading, which means it’s also where a whole new generation of grifters and middlemen are setting up shop.

Sattel explains the biggest challenge: “A lot of CTV ad buys are still locked up in upfronts and new fronts because buyers don’t trust biddable strategies. They don’t know what’s real and what’s garbage.”

So OpenX went nuclear on bad supply.

• Cut out indirect inventory.

• Reclassified anything that wasn’t truly CTV.

• Eliminated the “fireplace app” junk posing as premium inventory.

Sounds great, right? Except most of the industry doesn’t want this level of transparency, because it would reveal how much garbage they’ve been buying.

“We eliminated MFA, and yeah, we took a hit,” Sattel admits. “We weren’t performing as well on vanity metrics, because we weren’t playing the game anymore. But we did it because it was the right thing for publishers.”

When was the last time you heard an ad-tech executive say that?

🔥 What’s the Real Solution?

Here’s the cold, hard reality: There is no incentive to fix the programmatic supply chain.

• The people who could fix it profit from the inefficiencies.

• The buyers who should care about transparency are still grading success on useless metrics.

• And the industry keeps inventing new acronyms instead of solving problems.

Andy Dhanik, again, drops the truth bomb: “The platforms that push for real transparency usually aren’t the ones making the most money. There’s a reason the biggest ad-tech players have the least incentive to clean things up.”

And Sattel doesn’t disagree: "If we actually had transparency, you wouldn’t see so many LinkedIn posts about MFA, ad fraud, or broken supply chains. The whole game would shift overnight."

But it won’t.

Because ad tech isn’t built to be efficient. It’s built to be profitable.

🎤 The Big Question: Can Programmatic Be Saved?

At this point, the industry has two choices:

1. Get real about transparency and cut out the inefficiencies.

2. Keep playing the game and pretending the ad supply chain isn’t completely broken.

Spoiler alert: Most companies will choose option two.

Because as long as there’s money to be made from inefficiency, the inefficiency will remain.

And until advertisers start demanding receipts for where their dollars go, the house always wins

🚨 Programmatic’s Midlife Crisis: Direct Deals Are Taking Over

🔍 The Accusation:
The industry is shifting away from open auctions and moving towards direct deals, private marketplaces (PMPs), and programmatic guaranteed (PG) deals, as buyers demand more transparency, quality, and performance.

📜 The Evidence:

• David Kohl, Co-Founder at Symitri: "We’re absolutely seeing the ‘concierge service’ model. There’s a much greater demand for quality, transparency, and performance, and the more we can package these ingredients for buyers, the more they buy."

• Alexis Hochleutner: "100% on all of this. However, open auctions will always exist in some way as eyeballs are not completely predictable (no matter how good we get at tracking them)."

• Laura Gaffney, Head of Strategic Partnerships at InPowered AI: "I don't see open auctions going away, but it’s becoming less valuable compared to what publishers can now offer brands through PMPs and PG deals. It’s a win for marketers (better performance), publishers (higher CPMs + unique), and users (privacy-first approach)."

• Raphael Weiser: "Nice to see that everyone is finally getting it and not being taken for a ride anymore. We’ve been buying exclusively through PMP deals for years."

• Nyles Thorne: "The term 'Premium Inventory' is now being scrutinized—how users are identified and what sites are considered brand-safe matters more than ever."

• Kevin Kulma: "Publishers are keeping the good stuff for direct deals, leaving open exchanges with, well... less-than-premium impressions."

• Mark Pilipczuk: "Have been advocating for buying fewer, but better quality and direct for years. End of open auctions? Doubtful. The adtech bros will layer on exciting new stuff like AI to fool the magpies wasting advertiser media dollars."

⚠️ The Catch:
While premium publishers are pushing for direct deals, open auctions aren’t disappearing entirely. As Hochleutner and Gaffney point out, unpredictability in audience behavior and the scale of programmatic still make them a necessary part of the ecosystem. Meanwhile, there are concerns about whether “premium” inventory is truly premium or just a new label for the same problems.

🔥 The Big Question:
Is this a genuine industry shift towards quality, or just another cycle in adtech’s endless game of rebranding and repackaging?

🎤 Industry Response:
Buyers and publishers alike seem to be aligning on a preference for direct deals, but skepticism remains over how “premium” these buys really are and whether AI-driven solutions will truly improve transparency or just create another layer of complexity.

🚨 Rich Kahn on Ad Fraud: The Overlooked Problem in Programmatic

🔍 The Accusation:
DSPs claim to eliminate ad fraud using built-in solutions, but in reality, they’re only scratching the surface.

📜 The Evidence:

• Most DSPs rely on pre-bid fraud filters during RTB, which only detect General Invalid Traffic (GIVT)—basic bot traffic, data center fraud, and known threats.

• These filters use limited data points like IP address and UserAgent, which fraudsters easily bypass.

• Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT)—AI bots, malware, human fraud farms—go undetected because SIVT requires JavaScript-based analysis, which DSPs don’t use in real time.

⚠️ The Catch:

• JavaScript-based fraud detection is too slow for RTB, so DSPs ignore it.

• But when campaigns are tested with SIVT filters, 50% of traffic is often fraudulent.

🔥 The Big Question:
If half the traffic in programmatic campaigns is fraud, why aren’t DSPs addressing this with better tools?

🎤 Industry Response:
So far, silence. DSPs aren't incentivized to expose the depth of the fraud problem.

💬 Rich Kahn, CEO & Co-Founder:
“This concept is the most overlooked problem of programmatic.”