Why is programmatic media buying so dang complicated?
Everyone new to the advertising industry asks this question. Eventually, most learn to stop worrying and love (or maybe just resign themselves to) the increasing complexity of the media landscape.
That complexity was an ever-present topic at the 2025 ANA Media Conference in Orlando, Florida this week. And not everybody even considers it a problem.
The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green, for example, said he believes marketers should “embrace” and “understand the complexity of the ecosystem we’re in” rather than demand simplification for its own sake. Marketers that don’t properly educate themselves, he added, run the risk of giving up too much control to profit-incentivized vendors.
But even the most well-educated media professional can struggle with all the waste, inefficiency and noise that emerge through the cracks of an overly complex system. Which raises a bigger question: how do we make it better?
How did programmatic media buying get like this?
Most of the problems plaguing ad tech won’t come as any surprise to the average industry insider. Still, laying them all out one after another can be a pretty sobering experience.
First, there’s all the innovation to keep up with, said Kate Sirkin, EVP, data and partnership lead at Publicis Epsilon. New forms of content, new ways to engage business, new technology (especially AI) and new privacy restrictions can be too difficult for a single person or team to navigate.
Speaking of new content, the sheer amount of it being generated every day can be overwhelming, too. In a preview of Jounce Media’s upcoming State of the Open Internet report, founder Chris Kane shared that 26% of the supply currently available to DSPs was published within the last day, and 41% was published within the past week. (And that’s just on the open web!)
If it’s all too much for one team to keep track of, then the answer is to develop more teams, right? But that can cause complications as well, especially when those new teams get too siloed off from one another.
“Today we have a chief experience officer, a chief digital officer, a chief measurement officer. You have all these other roles that ostensibly compete for scarce resources from the CFO,” said Lou Paskalis, chief strategy officer for Ad Fontes Media.
These new disciplines become divorced from the marketing departments that birthed them, Paskalis added, because they can point to more tangible results to justify their budgets. Marketers, in the meantime, get stuck with what’s left over.
And, of course, you can’t ignore the biggest flaw that pervades the advertising world: human nature itself.
After all, creating new and sophisticated media structures can be “fun and exciting,” said Adam Benaroya, senior director of global media excellence at Kenvue. Marketers want to keep up with industry trends and promote themselves to their peers as leaders – and sometimes get distracted by shiny objects as a result.
Instead, he asked, what if marketers celebrated their ability to do more with less – to reduce waste, minimize effort and focus on impact? In other words, “How do we define the simplest, effective approach to reach our category buyers?”
How do we fix programmatic media buying?
For many other companies, breaking down those silos within data and departments alike can do a lot to make the whole workflow less complicated. (Or, as Publicis Groupe CEO Dave Penski so eloquently put it, “No silos, no solos, no bozos.”)
However, unscrambling that particular egg is easier said than done. Each company has to figure out how to break down the silos for itself, said Unilever Chief Brand Communications Officer Casey DePalma McCartney.
Take Unilever as an example. Previously, Head of Media Investment Aaron Sobol’s team would create the media plan and then send it to DePalma McCartney’s team to execute on. Last year, however, the marketing team consolidated all of its different teams – including national media, retail media, organic and paid social, brand marketing and sales marketing – into one integrated approach.
With this integration, Sobol said, it’s easier for the entire team to “rally around the business goal” rather than get bogged down in their separate duties.
Simplifying those individual functions can also help, too, particularly when data is concerned, said Benaroya. Kenvue’s own “strategic simplification agenda” so far involves analysis of third-party vendors, tightening of inventory selection and stricter guardrails on programmatic and data investments.
The goal, Benaroya said, is for simplification to lead to more global standardization across the brand, which can lead to better scale, which can then be further bolstered by automation – which then unlocks more simplification as a sort of virtuous cycle.
If the problem with programmatic media buying is ultimately a human one, so too is the solution, Benaroya concluded. This means ad tech professionals need to get more comfortable pushing back on projects that might be “unnecessarily complex.”
“There’s an increased need for all of our skill sets to drive this conversation,” he said.
