Speaking with Beet.TV, Accuen Global CEO Megan Pagliuca maintains that the future of programmatic media buying will involve more direct relationships between advertisers/agencies and publishers—a trend that will be hastened by header bidding. On the road to programmatic, first there was manual buying, and then came ad networks, which made programmatic media easier because of their mass reach. But, she says, “The challenge with that model was that the ad network was arbitraging and not working on behalf of the advertiser agency or the publisher." During last week's 4A's Transformation conference, Pagliuca said: “What we’re ultimately getting back to is where we started, with advertisers and agencies having direct relationships with publishers. Direct relationships have always been the intent.”