• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

Starting well over a decade ago, the ad industry saw the entry of dozens of companies hoping to turn Madison Avenue into Wall Street -- not by helping financial investors understand advertising-related companies and stocks as equity analysts do, but by trying to bring high-velocity market trading techniques, tools and practices to the ad market.

These companies peddled software tools and called themselves "programmatic," which most often meant “following a set structure, policy, or step-by-step agenda rather than acting randomly.” When you asked media legend Irwin Gotlieb, he would always say that “programmatic” was how he bought media for decades, whether at Benton & Bowles, Mediavest, Mindshare or Group M. He leveraged his own data-driven software systems to plan, value, price and buy media -- processes historically dominated by history, emotion and anecdote.

Without question, Gotlieb and his teams modernized our industry, trained unbelievable talent and fundamentally made us better.

The modern programmatic players promised to build on and extend that legacy and make advertising better, but they have not.

In fact, I believe that many of those efforts have instead hollowed out critical principals like content owners in the media and advertising world. Companies have obfuscated their practices with fancy dashboards, impenetrable acronyms and faux analytic attribution reporting that makes it seem as if each and every campaign they just ran raised the entire GDP of the U.S. by a point.

Basically, they used the word “programmatic” to sell principal trading without telling everyone that they were going to make most of the money. Delivering better ads or better yield was never what they were really about. Not too far from Wall Street, right?

Let’s not let it happen again.

Now that selling “AI” is hot and “agentic” is even hotter, it’s not surprising that every “programmatic” digital ad company is now claiming that they are agentic. Methinks it might just be selling their old wine of failing programmatic solutions in a hot wrapper of agentic.

Think about it. Agentic is about having autonomy and the ability to act independently to achieve a specific goal. Can platforms that take 70%+ of the money from advertisers’ transactions -- frequently in ways that are impossible to fully trace -- be the “agents” that you want to use to help you achieve your own specific goals?

To put it even more simply: Would you trust them enough to let your son or daughter date them?  

I didn’t think so.