Digital advertising has long promised precision and efficiency. But our obsession with “following the audience” has allowed low-quality sites and vanity metrics to thrive while brand integrity suffers.
This singular focus on targeting audiences and measuring their impact through typically non-incremental attribution, rather than evaluating media quality, has steered us off course.
The digital landscape is now packed with dubious inventory, fraudulent media properties and non-organic content – all of which ultimately work against brand goals rather than serve them. And thanks to automation and AI, it’s easier than ever to create junk sites.
Decades of advertising fundamentals tell us context matters. Media planners once focused on content alignment, environment quality and publisher credibility, ensuring ads resonated in valuable settings.
But the drive for audience-first targeting over the last 15 years has abandoned these principles in favor of hypertargeted audiences accessible anywhere – irrespective of quality.
An industry ready for change
In theory, an audience-centric strategy promised brands precision, delivering ads to the “right” people at the “right” time. And these impressions were validated through attribution models that claimed to connect outcomes to the ads served.
But in practice, we’ve enabled the rise of made-for-advertising (MFA) sites and venture-funded tech companies whose primary incentives do not align with those of their clients.
Ad tech platforms often promote MFA and other cheap placements to media buyers, who, encouraged by the low CPMs and vanity metrics, overlook the questionable environments. The result? A system that neglects the critical foundation of ad quality and instead encourages a race to the bottom.
More disturbingly, this audience-first obsession has created a generation of marketers trained to prioritize retargeting and hypertargeted segments over fundamentals like reach, frequency and contextual relevance.
Media buying is ultimately about maximizing effective reach. As brands fragment into smaller audience pools, they sacrifice that reach, driving up costs for access to smaller, increasingly competitive audiences.
And now, with cookie deprecation and signal loss underway, the audience-first approach is more tenuous than ever.
The primary beneficiaries of the audience-first model have not been advertisers or publishers but rather a few monopolistic tech companies. These companies, which encouraged the shift to audience-first, now seem to be under scrutiny every other week for placing ads on poor-quality sites. Still, they’ve pocketed massive profits while the responsibility for brand safety, transparency and ad effectiveness falls on the brands themselves.
Meanwhile, premium publishers struggle to survive. News publishers, once regarded as prime inventory, are blocked over “brand safety” fears, while brands settle for placement on obscure sites that artificially inflate impressions and serve little purpose.
But a cultural shift is underway. Walgreens Senior Director of Media Strategy and Planning James Lerner recently spoke at a Mediaweek event challenging walled gardens, calling attention to inflated metrics and transparency issues. His words underscore the need for more marketers to hold these platforms accountable.
Hershey VP of Media and Marketing Technology Vinny Rinaldi has also emerged as a change agent, urging marketers during his recent keynote at Programmatic I/O to prioritize creative quality and the environments where ads are served over mere audience targeting.
And during a panel about supply-path optimization at a recent PubMatic event, Bayer’s Head of Investment and Ad Tech, Gary Guarnaccia, called the audience to action, stating “Industry change depends on everyone’s participation, but it’s buyers who have the power to drive it. That’s why it’s crucial for buyers to understand the supply side thoroughly and actively support positive change in the market.”
These voices highlight the need for quality-based approaches – supply-path optimization, media curation and metrics that prioritize real engagement.
This new generation of marketers is identifying and investing in quality. They’re using metrics like video sound-on measurement, which gauges user engagement by assessing whether viewers keep audio enabled. They’re also doing real supply-path optimization, which involves analyzing log files and taking a deeper look into the supply chain, not just reducing the number of SSPs they work with. And they’re monitoring ad refresh rates, choosing placements with low or no refreshes to avoid paying for impressions that have minimal impact.
There’s been an awakening. The most sophisticated, industry-leading brands are tackling these challenges head-on, while those who aren’t risk being left behind.
A turning point
Digital advertising can either double down on this broken system, allowing intermediaries and poor-quality inventory to drain budgets, or it can prioritize transparency and quality. With AI automation on the rise, there’s a critical need to avoid repeating the mistakes of audience-first targeting.
Marketers today need to become vocal advocates for a more accountable industry, following the lead of those brave enough to stand up and fight for the future of our industry at the expense of their own job security.
Tides are shifting, and it’s on us to hold technology players accountable. We have to be the change we want to see. When the history books on this era of digital marketing are written, what side of history do you want to be on?
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
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