The human touch is the real fault in programmatic

Programmatic has its fair share of technological challenges, but the biggest, potentially unsurmountable challenge is human bias.

Aside from the short term benefits of “efficiency” and “achieving outcomes”, I see the real watch-out in the programmatic game is people and their motivational incentives.

On one side, there are the well covered challenges of fraud, dodgy/unclear supply chains, and sometimes even malice, but lurking in the background are the challenges of human bias. This is a combination of unclear goals, a lack of long-term direction, and the borderline obsessive focus on immediately attributable outcomes. These crappy instructions and measurement methodologies then get fed into the system and guide the machine doing the work.