Well, Paull, senior vice president at Starcom USA, doesn’t actually have an algorithm to deal with all the complexity that makes the programmatic marketplace so darn confusing, but it sounds like she’d like one.

“It’s like whack-a-mole,” she said, describing the lack of transparency in the programmatic marketplace as a game of new complexities popping up every time one is made understandable and transparent.

“For every place we start to get transparency… and simplicity of thoughts … we get another one [popping up with complexity],” she said, adding “I’m not sure we can solve the macro one, but maybe get a little clearer.”

Part of the problem, she suggested, is just plain old human nature, noting that people may simply be culturally conditioned to it from years of “black box” pitches from online ad networks, which grew into a Lumascape ecosystem of black boxes in the programmatic marketplace.

“It was almost like that we ‘liked’ that,” she said. “There is a little bit of people like it to be complex.”