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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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?

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

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.

At this point, the industry has two choices:

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

🔍 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:

⚠️ 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.

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

📜 The Evidence:

⚠️ The Catch:

🔥 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.”

Legend Jon Bond didn't mince words about the bloated ad supply chain when we spoke to him. His take? Everyone in the chain claims to boost effectiveness by 30%, but when you add it all up, the numbers don’t make sense. The reality is that there’s a hidden "ad tax" with too many middlemen taking a cut, and advertisers need to isolate each player to prove they’re actually delivering value.

On AI, he pointed to Inuvo (where he's on the board) as an example of a company using AI instead of cookies for targeting—an alternative to traditional tracking methods.

As for fraud, he sees it as an endless arms race between the good guys and the bad actors, with the biggest threat being whatever new tricks fraudsters are cooking up that the industry hasn’t even spotted yet.

In short: too many hands in the till, AI might be a way forward, and ad fraud is a never-ending game of whack-a-mole.

The number of intermediaries in the media landscape isn’t really about value; it’s about choice. Advertisers have the ability to mix and match partners, finding the combination that suits their needs. On paper, that sounds like a dynamic and competitive marketplace—lots of providers, each vying for a piece of the pie, theoretically driving innovation and efficiency.

But that’s the theory. The reality? Less sophisticated advertisers often bear the cost of this inefficiency because they don’t actually have real choice—they have the illusion of choice. And that illusion comes at a price. The decisions they make, often guided by sales pitches rather than deep strategic insight, tend to be expensively wrong. In short, they believe they’re optimizing, but in reality, they’re just paying more intermediaries without a corresponding increase in performance.

Ad fraud is, of course, a massive issue. But sitting right behind it, breathing down its neck, is sheer ignorance. The amount of money that gets flushed away due to inefficient media buying is staggering. Poor targeting, low-quality audiences, the failure to use inclusion lists, exclusion lists, or even the most basic geographical suppression—it all adds up. Marketers do dumb stuff. They pour money into bad pipes, and then they’re surprised when their campaigns underperform.

Programmatic, as a technology, does exactly what it was designed to do. The problem isn’t the technology—it’s the inputs. Most marketers are feeding programmatic systems garbage: low-quality data, flawed assumptions, and inadequate guardrails. When you put junk into the system, you get junk out. The result? Money torched and then flushed straight down the commode.

Artificial intelligence could actually save ad tech. The industry has a tendency to overcomplicate things, but if we can take human hands out of the batter—eliminate the gut-feel, opinion-driven decision-making that marketers insist on inserting—we might just end up with a better cake. AI can optimize in ways humans never could, reacting in real time without the biases and bad instincts that so often lead to wasted spend.

As for antitrust cases, they’re legitimate, but don’t expect the penalties to be earth-shattering. There will be fines, some legal wrangling, maybe a few divestitures, but in the end, the industry will adapt and move forward.

Programmatic will continue to evolve, and its future is in multivariant analysis. The ability to quickly test different audience cohorts, identify patterns, run controlled experiments, and scale up or down accordingly—that’s the next frontier. The feedback loop that programmatic enables could become incredibly powerful, but only if marketers actually use it correctly.

I love programmatic. And I hate programmatic. It’s the single most transformative innovation in digital advertising—and also the one that wrecked it. It took an industry that once relied on human intuition, relationships, and, yes, a little bit of elbow grease, and turned it into a hyper-automated, algorithmic black hole where money disappears, fraud thrives, and no one in charge seems to care.

And because we never learn from our mistakes, the ad tech industry is now hellbent on dragging this same bloated, scam-ridden system into CTV, because nothing says innovation like applying the exact same broken model to a new screen.

This is what we do. We take something useful, we scale it beyond recognition, optimize the soul out of it, and then pretend to be shocked when it devolves into a cesspool of fraud, inefficiency, and waste. Programmatic was supposed to bring efficiency, precision, and scale. Instead, it delivered an endless loop of ad fraud, middlemen skimming off the top, and an ecosystem so opaque that most CMOs couldn’t explain where their budgets actually go if their lives depended on it.

Scratch that. Their careers depend on it, and they still don’t ask questions. Probably because they know they won’t like the answers.

Let’s be honest: a massive percentage of people working in programmatic are straight-up grifters.

Not misguided optimists, not well-meaning innovators—scammers, liars, and professional skimmers whose entire business model is extracting money from brands while providing as little actual value as possible.

How bad is it? The DOJ has literally asked me to advise on cases involving ad fraud, and I’ve had to turn them down due to conflicts. That’s how rotten this business is. The ad tech world is a carnival of deception, run by people who figured out that if you create enough layers, enough complexity, and enough shiny dashboards, you can sell advertisers literal garbage inventory at premium prices.

Made-for-advertising (MFA) sites? That’s just an industry-friendly way of saying “we industrialized click fraud and made it socially acceptable.” Supply-path optimization (SPO)? A euphemism for charging you extra to avoid the exact problem we created. Viewability metrics? As reliable as a Tinder bio that says “just here for friends.”

And the best part? No one has to be accountable for results. Unlike traditional media, where performance was measured in actual business impact, programmatic operates on vanity metrics that exist solely to justify waste. Click-through rates, post-impression conversions, attention scores—it’s all just elaborate theater, meticulously designed to make sure no one actually talks about sales, revenue, or ROI.

If I were running a major agency, I’d be seriously considering class-action lawsuits at this point. I can tell you right now which programmatic providers are 99% fraud, 99% fake inventory, and still pulling in millions from agencies that are either too lazy or too scared to push back.

I’m talking about companies that have built their entire business model on selling counterfeit inventory—networks that don’t even pretend to be legitimate anymore because they know no one will hold them accountable. Agencies are spending millions on ad placements that don’t exist, being charged for impressions that never happened, and pouring budgets into a system that’s designed to enrich everyone except the actual advertiser.

And what’s the industry response? Nothing. No outrage. No mass exodus. No real effort to fix the problem. Because let’s be real—too many people are making too much money off this scam to stop it now.

If you think your ad dollars are being well spent, you’re probably wrong. The World Federation of Advertisers found that only 40% of programmatic ad spend actually reaches the publisher. That means 60% of every dollar gets siphoned off by DSPs, SSPs, trading desks, verification companies, and other layers of unnecessary middlemen.

Imagine hiring a moving company and discovering that 60% of your furniture disappeared before it even got to your new house. You’d be on the phone with the police. In ad tech, we call it business as usual.

And where does that money go? Bots, fake sites, and fraud networks that are making billions off advertisers who don’t ask enough questions. This is an industry where bad actors are so deeply embedded in the system that they don’t even have to hide anymore. You’ve got entire networks spoofing premium CTV inventory, faking device IDs, and inflating impression counts—all while agencies keep throwing money at them because CTV is the future.

It’s a brilliant business model if you don’t have a soul.

The programmatic world completely ruined display advertising, and now it’s setting its sights on CTV, the supposed next frontier of advertising. Instead of building a better model, the ad tech world is just copy-pasting the same scam onto streaming.

It’s already happening. Fraudsters are faking premium TV inventory. Device IDs are being manipulated at scale. Ads are being placed on paused screens, screensavers, and random garbage apps that no human is watching.

And advertisers? They’re throwing billions into it blindly, convinced that because CTV is growing, it must be working. It’s the same delusion that fueled early programmatic display. The belief that because the numbers are big, they must be real.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Programmatic isn’t inherently broken—but it needs to be fixed. And the only thing that can save it is curation.

Curation isn’t just another buzzword—it’s the antidote to the madness. Instead of buying from an open market full of fraud and waste, curation allows advertisers to directly control where their ads run, ensuring that budgets flow to legitimate publishers instead of scammers. It cuts out the junk, eliminates unnecessary middlemen, and forces accountability back into the system.

Better yet, it reduces carbon emissions—yes, the inefficiency of programmatic is literally killing the planet. Fewer wasted impressions, fewer unnecessary data transfers, and fewer junk sites burning energy just to steal your money.

It’s a simple concept: buy from people you trust, eliminate the middlemen who don’t add value, and force the industry to clean up its act.

But will the industry embrace it? Not unless they’re forced to. Because let’s be clear: the people making the most money off programmatic’s broken system have zero incentive to change it.

If advertisers don’t start demanding change—real, enforceable, structural change—then CTV will go the way of display. And in a few years, we’ll be having this same conversation about whatever new platform the industry decides to pillage next.

Until then? The grift continues.