DOING THINGS BETTER VS DOING BETTER THINGS

We’ve somehow managed to transform the most sophisticated technological leap in human history into glorified digital slot machines. And that’s not just disappointing, it’s tragic. Because breakthrough innovation becomes meaningless noise if you’re out there solving problems that never mattered in the first place.

THE GREAT MISDIRECTION

Something is fundamentally broken here. I’ve watched this industry burn through $802 billion while systematically optimizing for problems that are, let’s be honest, utterly irrelevant. Not irrelevant in some minor “could be improved” way. Irrelevant in that existential, gut-punch way that suggests we’re all sprinting with tremendous velocity toward absolutely nothing.

Look at platforms like SCIBIDS or PIXIS. Genuinely smart technology. They’ve cracked the code on squeezing disproportionate returns from human effort-hours and media spend. But here’s the thing that keeps me up at night. These approaches are trapped in a cramped, oversimplified prison of their own making. They cling desperately to immediate cost-savings metrics while ignoring the vast, untapped territory of what AI-driven media optimization could become. It’s like buying a Ferrari and using it exclusively for pizza delivery.

The real opportunity? It’s sitting right there. Waiting. It’s about grabbing the full spectrum of what AI optimization can do. From campaign execution efficiency to creative performance amplification to something far more interesting: execution that uncovers hidden growth opportunities nobody’s even looking for. Because everyone’s too busy chasing yesterday’s KPIs like dogs after their own tails. If media professionals pushed beyond these basic bidding strategies, they could unlock insane value, taking campaigns from competent to genuinely groundbreaking. They could. They aren’t. This isn’t a capability problem. It’s a mindset disease.

The sophistication has exploded exponentially. Dashboards glow with real-time data like something ripped from a cyberpunk fever dream. AI crunches trillions of decisions daily. Programmatic display ad spending hit $168 billion in 2024 in the US alone. Yet the fundamental question just hangs there, unanswered, mocking us: are we building bridges to somewhere that matters, or have we just become world-class architects of bridges to nowhere?

The evidence is everywhere you look. We could map out twelve game-changing categories of AI optimization, stuff that would completely invert how media operates. We’ve got the blueprints. We’ve got the technology. We’ve got case studies, concrete proof of massive improvements. And we’re building precisely none of it.

Instead, we’ve constructed this elaborate, deafeningly loud machine. It’s a virtuoso at solving problems that sound incredibly important in some vendor’s pitch deck but have absolutely zero relevance to the CMOs signing the checks. The average CMO at a Fortune 500 company? Their tenure sits at 4.3 years in 2024. Let that sink in for a moment. Four years to demonstrate results, build a brand, and avoid getting canned. Meanwhile, the tools being sold to them promise efficiency in areas they genuinely don’t need.

This is the dichotomy of the INCREMENTAL versus the FUNDAMENTAL. AI adoption by marketing generally, and advertising specifically, has produced a pitiful net delta of actual impact change. AI has been deployed in service of productivity and profits. Fine. It’s time we find ways to unleash AI on doing better things, not just doing things better.

DOING BETTER THINGS: TWELVE INSURGENT PATHS TO UNLOCK AI EFFECTS

BREAKTHROUGH EFFICIENCY

LOWER COSTS OF INCREMENTAL REACH

A genuinely smart approach would understand the psychological connections between your core audience and those adjacent market segments. Building expansion models that consider cultural context, consumption patterns, all those subtle social dynamics that determine whether your message lands or gets dismissed as digital noise.

Instead? Most campaigns spray indiscriminately across 44,000 websites when precise targeting could reach the same audience with a few hundred carefully chosen placements. It’s drunk poetry masquerading as media strategy. Performance art pretending to be planning.

TARGET SPECIFIC VTRs FOR EACH VIDEO

AI could predict completion probability. It would analyse creative content, user behaviour, device type, all those contextual factors that genuinely influence human decisions. Systems configured properly could deliver 15-30% view-through rates. They’d understand the ecology of attention, not just chase algorithmic presence.

Instead, platforms dish out whatever completion rates emerge naturally. Like restaurants serving food at random temperatures and calling it “personalization.” The technology exists. We just refuse to use it, because measuring what we’re already measuring feels safer than measuring what matters.

BRAND/CAMPAIGN BESPOKE AD MARKETPLACE

Real curation would mean understanding the contextual psychology of how people consume content. How someone reading financial news processes advertisements differently than someone watching entertainment. How their emotional state, shaped by different content categories, affects message reception.

Instead, we get automated list-making dressed up as strategy. Algorithms clump websites based on surface metrics, completely missing the subtle editorial environments that drive purchase decisions. Here’s a fun statistic: 13% of global open programmatic ad spend in Q2 2024 went to Made-for-Advertising sites. These garbage properties exist solely to extract ad revenue. The Association of National Advertisers found MFA sites accounted for 21% of impressions, with brands unknowingly pouring millions into digital sewers. But hey, let’s keep optimizing for reach.

ADVANCED MEDIA SPEND SCALING

The real breakthrough isn’t simply stopping spend on low-performing inventory. It’s about building systems that grasp the relationship between media investment and long-term brand equity. Systems that can distinguish between short-term conversion inefficiency and the lasting value of brand building.

Instead, we optimize for statistical significance, not actual business impact. We eliminate waste at the impression level while creating waste at the strategic level. Counting pennies while the whole house burns. For every $1,000 that hits a demand-side platform in 2024, only 43.9% reaches consumers. The rest? Consumed by supply chain friction, fraud, sheer inefficiency. It’s an improvement from 2023, sure, but it still means more than half your budget evaporates before anyone sees your ad.

BREAKTHROUGH EFFECTIVENESS: WHEN TECHNOLOGY SERVES BRAND PURPOSE

MAXIMIZE SUCCESS OF EVERY CREATIVE

A sophisticated approach would build systems that understand creative impact across the entire customer journey. Adapting messages based on where someone sits in the consideration funnel. Knowing when humour works versus when authority drives action. Using AI to supercharge great creative, not automate mediocrity.

Instead, most dynamic creative optimization amounts to basic template swapping. We possess the technology for generative AI to create genuinely meaningful personalization, but we use it to scale the average rather than elevate the exceptional. It’s like owning Photoshop and only using it to crop pictures.

RATIONALIZE IRRATIONAL CHOICE MECHANISMS

This means moving beyond direct response metrics. Optimizing for awareness, consideration, preference. The invisible forces that shape purchase decisions. Understanding that brand choice happens in those messy, irrational spaces somewhere between seeing an ad and taking action.

Instead, we chase clicks when we should be chasing minds. Deloitte’s Fall 2024 CMO Survey makes it painfully clear: 68% of marketing leaders fixate on immediate needs rather than future strategy. Because measuring brand impact feels harder than counting quick responses. Because the dashboard looks better when numbers tick up today, even if they signify nothing tomorrow.

TARGET HIGH ATTENTION PLACEMENTS

Research screams this truth: high-attention inventory delivers dramatically better business outcomes. The intelligent approach recognizes that not all impressions are created equal. Pay a premium for engaged audiences in quality environments.

Instead, we purchase media like commodity soybeans. The technical plumbing for attention-based buying exists on all major platforms, but we choose not to use it. Why? Because reaching everyone poorly feels safer than reaching fewer people powerfully. Global ad fraud losses topped $37.7 billion in 2024, with around 5.1% of programmatic ads being fraudulent. But hey, at least we hit those impression targets.

IMPULSE BASED CONVERSION

The convergence opportunity here is enormous. Using actual purchase behavior to guide media strategy across every touchpoint. Building audiences based on how people shop, not demographic assumptions. Optimizing for lifetime value, not quick conversion.

Instead, we treat retail media like some separate thing from the bigger strategy. Like running separate affairs instead of building a marriage. Integration remains a buzzword in PowerPoints but invisible in actual campaign architecture.

BREAKTHROUGH EXECUTION: THE ORCHESTRA CONDUCTOR WE REFUSE TO HIRE

CROSS-PORTFOLIO BUDGET MANAGEMENT

The real breakthrough sees budgets as living systems, not static allocations. Using AI to understand how different campaigns interact, the opportunity costs that human analysis simply can’t process at scale.

Instead, humans manually shuffle money between campaigns while machine learning sits there, idle. It’s perfectly capable of identifying the strongest performing segments in real-time. We’ve got the tools. They’re just gathering digital dust while some analyst moves numbers around in Excel.

CROSS MARKET BUDGET MAXIMIZATION

This requires AI systems that understand cultural differences, competitive dynamics, seasonal patterns across different regions. All while maintaining brand consistency and message coherence.

Instead, global campaigns remain collections of local efforts rather than globally optimized systems. Every market operates like its own little fiefdom, jealously guarding its budget, missing the larger opportunity entirely.

FIND HIDDEN POCKETS OF GROWTH

The sophistication here involves understanding that truly valuable audiences often hide in negative spaces between traditional segments. In behavioural patterns only visible when AI processes millions of micro-signals, stuff human observation can’t touch.

Instead, we target based on assumptions that might be completely wrong, too scared to challenge existing models. Global programmatic advertising is set to grow by $314.27 billion between 2022 and 2026. Yet we’re spending it chasing the same obvious audiences everyone else is chasing.

OPTIMIZE REAL-TIME AD CUT-THROUGH

This means pushing past the conversion obsession. Optimizing for the neural pathways that build long-term brand preference and purchase behaviour. Using machine learning to maximize memorability and brand impact, not just clicks.

Instead, we focus on immediate response when the real value lies in building long-term memory. We measure what’s easy instead of what matters.

THE FUNDAMENTAL MISDIRECTION

Here’s the raw truth of why none of this ever gets built: we’re solving the wrong problems. Completely. Most brand planning meetings – The conversation is existential. How do we find new people? How do we build lasting memories? How do we stand out in a crowded market? How do we balance making money today with still being around tomorrow? These are survival questions.

Now walk into any AdTech pitch. Different universe entirely. Improved view-through rates, better fraud detection, sophisticated attribution modelling. The engineering is impressive. But it’s a solution to problems nobody in that brand meeting has. This chasm exists because the industry optimizes for its own concerns rather than brand managers’. Agencies care about efficiency, attribution, streamlining, because it affects their workflow and client reports. Brand managers care about market share and survival.

We’re using different maps to navigate different jungles. Only 40% of Fortune 500 marketing leaders even hold the CMO title anymore. The role is splintering, dissolving, becoming something else entirely. And while that transformation happens, we keep selling solutions to problems that mattered five years ago.

THE AI ACCELERATION OF WRONG PRIORITIES

Just when you thought the trap couldn’t get more intricate, along comes AI to turbocharge our worst habits.

AI in programmatic bidding learns to master the flawed game we taught it. Feed it historical data, tell it to find the “most efficient” path to conversion. What does it discover? The cheapest clicks and highest viewability scores, living on garbage Made-for-Advertising sites. MFA sites comprise only 2% of unique websites globally but absorb 11% of total open programmatic ad spend. The result? AI accelerates the race to the bottom, becoming the most effective tool for funnelling brand dollars into digital sewers, all while dashboards glow with “success” metrics.

Generative AI promises personalized creative at infinite scale. The reality is a flood of mediocre, algorithmic content optimized for the click, not for connection. It’s automating the average when advertising needs to be memorable, distinctive, genuinely involving.

We’ve handed AI the keys to the same broken machine and told it to drive faster. Programmatic digital display ad spending shot up 15.9% year-over-year in 2024, with programmatic digital video jumping 20.9%. More money, same problems, just executed at higher velocity.

THE SHORT-TERM ADDICTION

The most insidious damage has been digital’s relentless addiction to short-term thinking. The power to track every click and conversion in real-time has created expectations of immediate, measurable results. That’s fundamentally at odds with how truly great brands are built.

Brands grow slowly. In that quiet accumulation of memories and feelings over time. This process is impossible to measure with the blunt instruments of last-click attribution and return-on-ad-spend. Research from Les Binet and Peter Field, published by the IPA after analysing thousands of effectiveness case studies, proves this: effective brands pump roughly 60% of their budget into long-term brand building and 40% into short-term activation. This isn’t theory. It’s hard data from actual campaigns that worked.

Yet digital metrics and dashboards push marketers relentlessly toward that 40%, cannibalizing the 60% that drives sustainable growth. So many companies can’t see the long-term ROI of brand building, especially when budgets are tight. They prioritize quick wins, focusing on performance marketing for instant returns.

The average CMO tenure sits at 4.3 years for Fortune 500 companies. With that pressure to show immediate results, who can afford to wait for five-year brand strategies to pay off? It’s easier, much easier, to focus on immediate, measurable metrics digital throws at you rather than grappling with strategic questions of sustainable growth.

THE INNOVATION-IMPACT FALLACY

We’re drowning in genuine innovation: machine learning fine-tuning campaigns in real-time, advanced attribution tracking consumer journeys across dozens of touchpoints, blockchain-based verification systems. The programmatic advertising spending market is projected to swell by $892.7 billion between 2024 and 2029, growing at a CAGR of 38.1%. The pace of technological advancement rivals any sector.

But examine brands over two decades and you’d be hard-pressed to find a single instance where digital innovation fundamentally altered their growth trajectory. Brands winning before programmatic kept winning with it. Those struggling kept struggling, just with fancier tools to manage their decline. This is because most digital innovation is incremental, not transformative. Game-changing innovations carve out entirely new ways for brands to connect. Television didn’t just make radio more efficient; it birthed a whole new visual language. Search didn’t just optimize display; it tapped into human intent in ways previously thought impossible.

Today’s digital feels defensive by comparison. Multi-touch attribution was peddled as the holy grail. Finally, you’d see the customer’s entire journey, assign value to every touchpoint. The reality? So many brands found it impossibly complex, expensive, and ultimately inconclusive.

Our technical capabilities have exploded while actual effectiveness has nose-dived. We’re not changing the game; we’re writing more complicated rulebooks for one we’re already losing.

THE PATH NOT TAKEN

So here we are. Standing at a goddamn inflection point. We can keep building ever-more-sophisticated engines humming with efficiency while driving straight off a cliff. A future where AdTech companies get richer and brands watch their returns shrivel. In 2024, marketers did cut spending on low-value MFA publishers from 15% in 2023 to 6.2% in 2024. Progress, sure. But we’re celebrating moving from utterly terrible to merely bad.

Or we can choose a different path. The alternative demands fundamental reorientation. A return to first principles where technology serves strategy, not the reverse. Measuring what matters, brand equity, memory, differentiation, not just what’s easy to count.

Those twelve breakthrough categories are proof. We know what needs building. The frameworks exist. The technology is ready for prime time. The case studies scream ROI. Recent IPA research, after dissecting over 2,000 advertising case studies, found this: brands in early stages that build strong brand effects with their advertising see 58% higher sales value and 55% more profit than peers chasing performance marketing.

What’s missing isn’t capability. It’s the intellectual guts to admit we’ve been playing the wrong game entirely.

1. Redefine Success Metrics: Ditch technical delivery metrics, shift to brand equity. Prioritize brand lift studies, market share analysis, modern econometrics that capture slow, compounding effects of brand building. Stop celebrating vanity metrics that look pretty on dashboards but mean absolutely nothing to actual business outcomes.
2. Quality-Based Optimization: Pay a premium for engaged audiences in quality environments. The move from open marketplaces to private marketplaces accelerated in 2024, with 59% of spending in private marketplace deals. That tells you marketers seek closer ties with publishers. Aggressively block Made-for-Advertising sites. Reward publishers creating content people value.
3. Integrate Creative and Technology: Digital should amplify great creative, not substitute for it. Build tools that help understand if messages resonate, not just if delivery boxes were technically “seen.” Contextual targeting can boost ad relevance by 63%, but only if we’re delivering relevant creative in the first place.
4. Embrace Long-Term Thinking: Bake true costs, environmental impact, user experience, brand equity, into algorithms. An ad that pisses off users or funnels money into carbon-belching fake sites isn’t “efficient,” no matter what the dashboard claims. Connected TV ad spend is projected to jump 18% in 2024, with programmatic grabbing 88% of total CTV video ad spending. New channels, same mistakes, unless we fundamentally change how we think about effectiveness.

The talent is there. The resources are there. The technical brilliance is proven. The real question is whether we possess the courage to admit we’ve been building bridges to nowhere while destinations that matter remain completely out of reach. We have the tools. We just need to remember why we picked them up in the first place. The breakthrough categories are mapped. The technology is ready. Digital advertising made up 67% of global ad revenue in 2022 and is forecast to hit 73% by 2028. More money, more tech, more complexity. The only question left is whether we’ll finally start solving problems that matter. Or just keep perfecting solutions to problems that don’t.